Arts

In a converted Brooklyn warehouse, strangers lie together to witness an immersive installation featuring a trippily bizarre and stunning video.

At first, Radiohead wasn’t top of mind when I entered the main room of the Agger Fish Building at the Brooklyn Navy Yard one recent afternoon for a showing of their video project, Kid A Mnesia, on four large screens mounted on the walls.

The sight of a mass of people lying down in a converted industrial warehouse, randomly arrayed in the centre of the space on padded mats in singles, couples, and groups – with others seated upright against cushioned and curved walls around the sides —jolted me back over 20 years to Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Under Eliasson’s hazy and blazing artificial sun, people lay, rolled around, made shapes, and even did yoga. Nearly 2 million visitors were transfixed by the orb’s unrelenting glare during its headline-making, six-month residency between October 2003 and March 2004.

The so-called “Motion Picture House”, which has been purpose-built to showcase Kid A Mnesia, may host far fewer people but both installations aspire in their own ways to transform art into an act of communion and connection. The design of the space is intended to “blend” with the world of the film, the band says.

Before the video started, an onscreen clock ticked in silent countdown, the Radiohead fans waiting in expectant and reverent silence for their experience to begin. (Pro-tip: if a neighbouring attendee removes their shoes to lie down, watch where you lay your head; the whiff of smelly socks may detract from the intensity of the experience.)

Directed by Sean Evans and featuring the art of Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s frontman, and Stanley Donwood, the band’s long-time visual associate, Kid A Mnesia folds the music of the band’s fourth and fifth studio albums, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001) into a trippily bizarre and stunningly beautiful animated 75-minute video. Models (including one huge creature) and paper materials created by Yorke and Donwood during the Kid A and Amnesiac recording sessions are on display on and in surrounding walls and rooms, including familiar Radiohead figures and mascots like the grinning bear and crying minotaur.

This large-scale project is the third iteration of Kid A Mnesia, which was first released as an album in 2021. Covid put paid to the idea of an accompanying exhibition at the time; instead, the same year Kid A Mnesia was released as a digital and interactive experience for PlayStation 5, macOS and Windows users. The opening of the installation in Brooklyn follows its debut at this year’s Coachella festival where it was housed within a 17,000 square-foot underground bunker with 38-foot ceilings.

The soundtrack to the video and installation, Radiohead has said, includes an entirely new mix drawn from the Kid A and Amnesiac multitracks, “rendered in six-point surround sound and composed to work with the architecture of the theatre”. In practice, this amounts to an immersive soundtrack featuring a bewitching mash-up of multiple styles: jazz, ambient soundscapes, rock, dance music, synthesisers, and the classical and orchestral. From moment to moment, propulsive rock segues to the hauntingly choral, then to discordant clanking, and menacing droning and dirges.

This complex musical tapestry matches the surreally gorgeous film we watch unfold on the four screens (each showing the same images), which – like its 2021 precursor — feels like a video game. Yorke has described the story as one in which “a monster is trapped in a derelict museum of the lost and forgotten” this odyssey themed around isolation and disconnection, we follow a part-creature, part-minotaur as they trudge — looking like an exhausted, depressed cyberman-meets-cockroach — through rooms, spaces and landscapes that are both dream and nightmare-like. Other strange creatures — stick-like beings and others which might summon up memories of Tony Hart’s Morph — stalk and amble around.

In one scene, the monster is in a dour black and white post-apocalyptic hellscape, then a flickeringly-lit hotel corridor, then ascending through a museum space with curved walkways that looks very much like the Guggenheim. Where the creature is going is never made clear, but its force of will implies a purpose of some kind – with its clenched, teeth-baring expression and head-down determination suggesting both a confrontation and embrace of the isolation all around them.

The video is filled with both light and darkness, stark monochrome and blazing colour. Studded within the creature’s grim-seeming journey are moments of ecstasy: a dance-off with fellow monsters, the visual delight of a confetti-like snowstorm, and our hero flying around in a gravity-defying void. Finally, and very movingly, the creature finds a connection of sorts. This cathartic moment perhaps also underlines the intent of the show itself, in which a group of disconnected strangers lie down together, for 75-minutes peaceably connected by the subtly intense, communal experience of Kid A Mnesia.