The little demons that capered and cried through Donwood’s landscapes are here, wrought from paper, with eyes and fangs of ink. But the strongest presence in Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is far from human. True, there are videos of the band’s various performances, hidden in small projection rooms. In an interview with Rolling Stone at the time, Ed O’Brien, a guitarist in Radiohead, claimed, “You couldn’t do Kid A live and be true to the record,” adding, “You would have to do it like an art installation.” The reason for such disparity between the album, as it was vacuum sealed onto CDs, and the live shows, according to O’Brien, was simple: “When we played live, we put the human element back into it.” No danger of that here. Why should this be the case? It has something to do, I think, with the setting. The most striking thing about Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is the feeling, humming through its airy halls, that twenty years has done little to dissuade us of that trouble it continues to impend, never breaking apocalyptically loose nor dwindling into a memory. As we move through each space, songs-or scraps of songs, sliced and looping-play from both, and the mood is pierced by a sense of impending trouble. These two albums (recorded during the same sessions and originally intended as a double release) are both locked in an uneasy digital air. We are gazing (in first-person, with a zoom feature, and the ability to break into a brisk jog) at art that is two decades old-made, as we are informed by the description on the PlayStation Store, “as the millenium loomed.” And much remains of that looming. Here the work, though freshly displayed, feels cold, and that may be the point. The effect there was one of immediacy-as though every fright had flared up in the head of its creator, Michel Ziegler, only seconds before it was worried onto the page and piped into the game. Looking at the gnarled and scribbled boughs, I was reminded of Mundaun, whose horrors were sketched out and scanned onto a faded plane. The trees are scratchily conjured in the style of Stanley Donwood, who, in collaboration with Yorke, produced a wealth of artwork for the two albums (some of which was collected in the cheery volume “Dead Children Playing”). Or reality.” True enough, we begin Kid A Mnesia Exhibition with a short walk through a wood-an opportunity denied to visitors of, say, the Louvre. Because then it didn’t have to conform to any normal rules of an exhibition. Yorke, writing on the PlayStation Blog, hymns the virtues of the virtual: “It would be way better if it didn’t actually exist. Next, Westminster council had a problem with his plan to make it “look as if it had crashed into the side of the Royal Albert Hall.” Now it has found a good home, especially on the PS5, which already looks as if a brutalist spacecraft had crashed into your living room. The band’s lead singer, Thom Yorke, first wanted a physical space-welded from shipping containers and resembling a “brutalist spacecraft” and an “ice pick”-but it wouldn’t fit in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Not only because it is free, on PlayStation 5 and PC, but because this marks the third attempt at building such an exhibition. The strangely titled Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is an interactive art installation, furnished with the writing, recordings, and highly pressurised gloom of two albums, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001), from the English rock band Radiohead.
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