Indeed, there is a sense in which Kid A Mnesia: Exhibition is the inverse of a traditional gallery. Occasionally, they give way to black or negative space, as well as to a few other surprises that confirm it wouldn’t have been possible to deliver this experience in any other medium. Mostly spans of brutalist concrete architecture, they are populated with creepy stickmen that recall something of the vibe of Anderson and Yorke’s Netflix film.
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Demons trapped in amber or scurrying amongst tree roots, the mountain peaks from the cover of Kid A visible through windows like a real-life vista before an unexpected shift of perspective, liner notes and lyric sheets that cover an entire room like peeling wallpaper - these are just some of the spaces available to explore while entire songs, snippets of songs, and other sounds from the two albums fade in and out in the background.Įach area is marked with a sign for the songs it’s linked to - “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” this way, “The National Anthem” that way - but the spaces between the main exhibits are no less fascinating. Some of the spaces boast impressive texture and lighting work, and all of them are interesting. You can also scan QR codes with your real-life phone, which will bring up a map of the exhibition. You can walk or run, look around you, zoom in, and occasionally interact with an object.
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Available for free on PlayStation 5 and on PC and Mac through Epic Games Store, it’s essentially a two-hour-ish first-person-perspective walking simulator through a collection of spaces that might be loosely described as a virtual gallery. As Yorke has explained, “this period of work was when voice through the artwork.” Meanwhile, Stanley Donwood, the main creator of art for most of Radiohead’s career and a key author of Kid A Mnesia: Exhibition, has talked about making art while the band wrote music in the same space, so the two became intertwined as a single experience.Įven if the existence of Kid A Mnesia: Exhibition is not too surprising then, it does work surprisingly well.
The choice to mark Kid A and Amnesiac in this way also makes sense from a purely personal point of view. However, Kid A and Amnesiac pushed that trajectory much further, incorporating influences from ambient, electronic, jazz, and post-rock and often eschewing guitars or traditional rock ’n’ roll structures altogether. Looking back, Kid A and Amnesiac are sometimes overlooked in the shadow of OK Computer - arguably the band’s most widely known effort, as well as the one that’s frequently credited for revolutionizing their sound and putting them on a firmly experimental trajectory. It is fitting, too, that Kid A Mnesia: Exhibition commemorates 20-something years since the band’s fourth and fifth studio albums, recorded at the same time but released in 20 respectively.
There is a sense in which it was only a matter of time before Radiohead expanded into one of entertainment’s most interactive mediums with Kid A Mnesia: Exhibition. Guitarist Johnny Greenwood scored Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood back in 2007, for example, and Anderson worked with frontman Thom Yorke in 2019 on a short film for Netflix and IMAX. Nor is it completely unexpected - virtual performances by real-life artists are increasingly common, and members of Radiohead have toyed with the boundaries between music and other forms of artistic expression for years. In a year that has given us the likes of Genesis Noir, Mundaun, and Cruelty Squad, a virtual art exhibition by one of the world’s biggest rock bands is perhaps not the most unusual release in the medium.
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