Kid A Mnesia Exhibition

The release of Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac came at a time when I was beginning to be more receptive to experimental music. I think only later on I began to appreciate the impact of Radiohead's stylistic departure from their previous work, which although distinct from mainstream rock music was still relatively traditional in instrumentation and sound overall. Listening to these albums felt very exploratory and introspective. All of the supplementary artwork and music video shorts evoked even further a sense of something dark, bleak and mysterious going on with this music, resisting easy interpretation.

Although recorded together, Kid A and Amnesiac were released a year apart in 2000 and 2001 respectively. I bought Kid A when it released but held off on Amnesiac apart from the singles. I did end up buying it later and listening to it even more than Kid A, but over time they sort of blended together into the double album that they/it originally was/were.

Fast forward twenty years and I'm met with a surprising notification on my desktop from the Epic games app promoting a free "Kid A Mnesia Exhibition". Wtf is this? Turns out that as part of promotional efforts for the 20-year anniversary reissue of "Kid A Mnesia" the band had teamed up with game developers Namethemachine and Arbitrarily Good Productions, as well as Epic games, to create a kind of game/ virtual exhibit featuring art and music originally intended for a physical installation that got scrapped due to the covid pandemic.

Being free to download at the time I had no excuse to not check it out.  As I expected, there wasn't much 'gameplay' in store as such, but exploring this virtual space felt like a pretty fresh and special experience, quite compelling and immersive even without it being a vr-game.

In many respects the space is structured and styled as a real-world, physical art exhibition would be, but the mutability and lack of restriction that a virtual space affords soon got me thinking of the potential of these kinds of curated virtual experiences. Different ways to navigate and traverse these spaces can be utilised to a variety of effects. Environmental conditions can be altered dependent on the context of a specific piece of art. Spatial audio, lighting effects, interactions with objects; there are many avenues to designing these virtual spaces in creative and surprising ways. 

The limits of this virtual space relate more to resources and hardware. How much art/content are you willing to digitise or model? Can it run on a regular desktop or will it require specialized equipment to run as intended? The resources dictate how rich or sparse the virtual space can be.

I was very pleased with the level of detail and quantity of material available to explore here. Also there were several well executed audiovisual sequences that were simply cool to experience. I want more of this! But I suspect that to reach a similar level in the quality of the virtual experience is not in reach for many artists, especially for something that you give out for free. 

It'll take a behemoth like Radiohead and the deep pockets of the likes of Epic games to put out something this polished.

That said, the tools to develop games and digital assets for them are widely available and affordable today. It is more a question of to what extent artists want to engage with their audience in this kind of interactive medium? Like games in general, this medium is inherently less one-sidedly controlled by the author, with more agency transferred to the recipient, their experience being dependent on how they choose to engage with the content. I eagerly await more opportunities to explore such virtual spaces.