Radiohead release the Kid A Mnesia Exhibition as a free download

Kid A Mnesia Exhibition came out on 18 November as a free download for PlayStation 5, and for PC and Mac through the Epic Games Store. It is built from Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood's original artwork for Kid A and Amnesiac. Nigel Godrich made its sound from the albums' multitrack tapes, set loose from stereo and from the LP and CD sleeve. First shown at Sony's PlayStation Showcase in September, it is billed as a reworking of the Kid A Mnesia reissue XL put out on 5 November.

The opening screen says it is not a game, and there is nothing to operate: no buttons, levers or puzzles. The visitor wanders a large compound on several levels, past about two dozen installations. Each is tied to one or more songs from the two albums, often broken into their separate parts, and the corridors between are covered in drawings, paintings and scraps of writing from the period. Edoardo Vitale of Rolling Stone Italia puts a walk through it at about an hour, with music in every room that answers the visitor as they move.

Yorke and Donwood spent about two years on it with Godrich, through lockdowns and long Zoom calls. The video artist Sean Evans directed it. Every picture in it is one the two made 20 years ago. We had one guiding principle, visually. NO NEW WORK. Because… there was loads of it already.⁴

Writing on the PlayStation Blog on release day, the two say they first planned an exhibition in central London, a huge red structure of welded shipping containers that would look as if a brutalist spacecraft had crash-landed into the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington. From there it would have gone to New York, Tokyo and Paris. It could not go into the V&A without parts of the museum falling down, so they moved it to the side of the Royal Albert Hall, where Westminster council objected, and then Covid ended the plan. Our dream was dead. Until we realised… It would be way better if it didn't actually exist.⁴