Exhibit A

Radiohead’s collaboration with Epic is a vivid experiment in interactive art

Back in January 1999, Radiohead and producer Nigel Godrich walked into a Paris studio to begin recording a pair of albums that would set the band on a new, wildly different trajectory. Although both Kid A and Amnesiac have been widely reappraised since, this sudden shift from art-rock to electronica baffled legions of fans (and much of the music press) at the time. Now, this interactive exhibition has been built around a selection of songs from the 20th-anniversary rerelease of these albums. Yet Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is no hollow promotional exercise, but something far stranger and more interesting.

Three years before those early sessions, Peter Gabriel released Eve, an earnestly odd CD-ROM adventure featuring bizarre dreamscapes soundtracked by his own music, which the player could collect and remix. We’ve seen dozens of collaborations between musicians and videogames since, but Kid A Mnesia is perhaps the first that feels like it belongs to the same lineage. It’s effectively a virtual museum tour meets avant-garde walking simulator, with sequences that suggest Tetsuya Mizuguchi adapting the lightshow from a Radiohead concert (as well as one or two moments that suggest Jeff Minter was fighting him for the controls).