obliquity of a
natural
soul
emma
bloom
on brian
eno
Obliquity of a Natural Soul is a sensate experience intended to take the beholder through not only famed non-musician Brian Eno's album Another Green World, but his entire artistic anthology. This artist book was birthed from a capstone assignment during my time at Columbia College Chicago where the task felt all too simple: make a biographical archive on my professor's favorite musician. While some students centered on Eno's abstract light sculptures and most others on his various hardcore 1980's personas, I was drawn to the familiar album art I had recognized from a long-ago watched documentary eulogizing chef Anthony Bourdain. I went in the direction of Another Green World.
During my research on this particular album from Eno's career, I had found myself beaten to the punch - Geeta Dayal, an author for Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 book series on popular albums, had done much of my work for me. Using her research on "the father of ambient music" I quickly assembled the main textual content of my work in order to free up my time to focus on the other symbolic elements of the book.
Nature, romanticism, grunge, and ambience. Pillars in my and Eno's creative process. Restricting myself to only listen to Eno's ambient albums during the period of creating this book, finding imagery, textures, and the book's paper from out in the world, my professor's inspiration-building classroom activity featuring uncooked spaghetti, and the utilization of some oblique strategies led to the culmination of the unique features presented in my final project. A wood and rope binding, handwritten content, and my newfound process for oil-soaked paper, which creates a shift in the transparency of paper fibers, are what these process photos cannot fully capture. Let's just say, if I end up sending this book to Brian,
I will certainly include archival gloves.
The beginning stages of this project involved raw spaghetti. Professor gave us instructions to break up loose spaghetti on a table, take a photo, and incorporate these elements into our final work. As most of my classmates opted to use their spaghetti as overlaid textures atop their final designs, I treated individual sections of my spaghetti as vector elements. These little icons also act as page spread sign-posts, indicating which pages “go together”. Digitally manipulating the spaghetti created some very inspiring shapes that led to most of the book’s overall chaotic design.
This book’s namesake comes from Brian Eno’s famous “Oblique Strategies” cards, which act as an interactive ideation method. For this project, Professor incorporated the use of these cards for each designer at different stages throughout the course. The instructions I was given from the deck of strategies each made their way into the final book, directly and indirectly, and were crucial to the project.