Kid A Mnesia Exhibition: Explore two iconic Radiohead albums in an experimental dreamscape
Both digital concerts and immersive exhibits have evolved in recent years, transforming from burgeoning experiments to mainstream genres in their own right. Games like Minecraft and Fortnite have welcomed artists like BTS and Charli XCX to their virtual stages. Meanwhile, a new world of tactile and dimension-crossing exhibits have blossomed in meatspace, from Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms to Virtual Realms: Videogames Transformed, which saw contributions from game dev auteurs like Hideo Kojima and Tetsuya Mizuguchi.
In 2021, both of these concepts collided in Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, a bold collaboration between Radiohead and the Epic Games Store. Developed by Sean Evans, Christine Jones, [namethemachine], and Arbitrarily Good Productions, Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is a groundbreaking playable experience. Part game, part digital installation, the exhibition contorts the sonic and visual identities of tracks from Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac albums, spreading them across a profound maze of rooms that players can explore at their own pace.
Initially, Kid A Mnesia Exhibition was intended to be a physical exhibition in London. Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood described it to the PlayStation.Blog as a “Huge red construction made by welding shipping containers together, constructed so that it looked as if a brutalist spacecraft had crash-landed into the classical architecture of the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington.”
Yet their ambitions only grew, and the disruption of the COVID pandemic forced the creative forces behind the project to adapt. Disregarding the rules of a physical installation, Kid A Mnesia Exhibition transmuted into a new digital home that pushed the boundaries of immersive art and homage. The result is a beautifully complex and dissociative space that begs to be explored.
Yesterday, I woke up sucking on a lemon
Kid A Mnesia Exhibition begins by dropping you in a monochromatic forest with no instructions. Follow a red illumination, and you’ll find a hallway beckoning you with a remix of "Everything in Its Right Place," accompanied by a poem that sets up the experience by saying "SOME PLACES WILL MAKE SENSE, SOME WILL NEVER MAKE SENSE, SEE YOU LATER."
Beyond basic first-person movement, there are no specific interactions to speak of, collectables to find, or a straight-laced story to follow. Like any real-world art installation, your job is to participate and to wade through the exhibition's spaces, allowing the lure of transcendent works to build curiosity and momentum. The world and its eerie spectres cannot hurt you or end the experience—you are the master of your own exploratory ship, sailing through an ocean of modulated sounds.
More than anything, patience is Kid A Mnesia Exhibition’s greatest virtue. The rooms you enter may appear simple at first glance, but oftentimes require time to unfold. For example, The Paper Chamber features sketches and scribbles painted across the walls. A few sheets of paper hover at the room's center as the track "In Limbo" plays softly. Wait a while, and the papers flutter and shift, before returning to their previous form—only this time, the information on the floating pages has changed.
Limbo is, by definition, an in-between space for thoughts, ideas and experiences. This room, packed with curious concepts and disconnected script, creates a striking visual impression of not just the song itself but of the strange discomfort of an unfinished grey space.
As you journey between places and spaces, the linking hallways are etched with lore from the Kid A and Amnesiac albums, in spiral sketches and word fragments pasted over cement walls. The traced poems and doodles summon a grungy atmosphere that compliments the brutalist construction of the exhibit's major areas. Large structures like the centrally located Pyramid Atrium shock you with a belittling sense of scale, which contrasts the claustrophobic and detritus-littered halls.
It's easy to get lost in Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, but if you need some help navigating, an accompanying map links the locations together and shows you what tracks play in each location, so you can string together a pseudo-EP of your favorite moments from Kid A and Amnesiac.
Nervous messed up marionettes
Owing to its initial ambitions as a physical exhibit, you aren’t completely alone in the Kid A Mnesia Exhibition. Scrawny stick figures lean against walls and wander this liminal realm. The figures are often shrouded in shadows or obscured by light, with their movements, faces, and posture purposefully hidden. The uncanny figures in Kid A Mnesia Exhibition are unexplained and unknowable, akin to locking eyes with a stranger in a museum. It’s almost more isolating to be around them than to go it alone.
Other strange organisms appear across the exhibit, like a roomful of ghosts wearing the band's monster-bear logo as a face. Elsewhere, inside the central Pyramid Atrium, a towering but spindly-legged bull moves like clockwork as the piano melody from Kid A fills the room. This sour cocktail of visual and auditory inputs toes a careful line between dream and nightmare.
Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is a worthwhile experience even if you’re completely unfamiliar with Radiohead, but for fans it provides a uniquely intimate window into the period that came after the success of 1997’s OK Computer. It captures the frustrated turn-of-the-century art of its creators, preserved and adapted to be consumed some twenty years later. Such curious bits and pieces can help you piece together your own interpretations—or, at the very least, allow you to step into Radiohead's complex musical miasma.
Hop into Kid A Mnesia Exhibition on the Epic Games Store, and enjoy the show.