How to Disappear Mostly

I wandered through the Brooklyn Navy Yard for 15 minutes searching for the Motion Picture House, feeling lost despite signs pointing the way. When I arrived at the nondescript factory space, the insides were draped in black fabric, with passageways leading to different rooms of an art exhibit. One room was filled with dozens of analog TV sets playing static-y animations set to Radiohead songs. Longtime fans might remember the “blips” that aired on MTV in the lead-up to 2000’s Kid A and 2001’s Amnesiac, cryptic bumpers featuring Radiohead’s modified bear logo or other imagery from the mind of artist Stanley Donwood. Seeing the blips essentially repurposed here emphasized the fact that, for most of their existence, Radiohead was ahead of their peers when it came to using art and technology to connect with listeners.

As such, I came to this empty warehouse with medium-high expectations. Was it something akin to a museum exhibit, or an immersive “experience” inside the narrative world of an album, like Mitski’s Tansy House installation at The Shed? Or was it more like the Sphere in Vegas, only without the performers? My gold standard for musician-focused exhibitions ranges from the relatively straightforward, sonically-driven “David Bowie is,” to Annie Lennox’s evocative Mass MoCA showing “Now I Let You Go…,” essentially a dirt mountain scattered with her personal keepsakes. What I did not expect was to lay around with strangers in a cavernous room and watch a panoramic playthrough of a video game featuring Donwood’s artwork with RH frontman Thom Yorke, set to new mixes of Kid A and Amnesiac.

That’s not an exaggeration: Five years ago, Epic Games unveiled this same surreal universe as the first-person explorative game KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION, coinciding with the albums’ “coming of age” and a reissue campaign. The pandemic was pandemic’ing, which meant that original plans for a physical exhibition were put on hold. At this point, with the amount of HD playthrough videos on YouTube, you could put together a DIY version of the experience at home if you have excellent speakers and several projectors. For most people, though, the grand scale of the video screens and the booming spatial audio are what make Motion Picture House an Event in the first place.