Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia Motion Picture House Opens in Brooklyn After Coachella Debut

After debuting at Coachella last month, Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia Motion Picture House opened its two-month New York run on Wednesday at the Agger Fish Building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The installation opened on a gray night in an industrial corner of the yard. The Agger Fish Building is a warehouse that has been a hub for marine products. The space had none of those smells when the exhibit began.

Kid A Mnesia first appeared beneath the Coachella grounds in a bespoke 17,000-square-foot bunker with 38-foot ceilings that promoter Goldenvoice built for the festival. That version ran during the festival, where headliners and news around the lineup dominated coverage. The band has since scheduled multi-week runs in Chicago, Mexico City, and San Francisco through January 2027, giving visitors access without a festival pass.

Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia exhibit in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Kate Izor

The film and the source materials

Much of the material in Kid A Mnesia traces back to the 2021 reissue campaign that collected the 2000 album Kid A, the 2001 follow-up Amnesiac, and an additional disc of session material. The exhibit’s centerpiece is a 75-minute film that premiered in 2021 as a download for PS5, PC, and Mac.

The film was directed by Sean Evans and features the art of frontman Thom Yorke and longtime visual collaborator Stanley Donwood. Much of that artwork is also collected in the 2022 book Kid A Mnesia: A Book of Radiohead Artwork, and it appears throughout the rooms that surround the screening area.

The physical exhibit plays the long game

Visitors receive a two-hour time slot. The first half-hour is for wandering the compound. The adjacent rooms and halls contain posters of lyrics and drawings, rows of stacked televisions, and statues representing characters from the film.

The space is disorienting by design. An ambient hum fills the rooms. Snippets of ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ and ‘Idioteque’ float through the halls. Viewers familiar with Radiohead iconography will recognize recurring motifs. As those motifs recur in the film, some attendees copied the "Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen" meme from Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

A novel way of watching a film

The viewing room diverges from a conventional screening. The floor is lightly padded and rises a few feet up slanted walls. Four large padded benches form a square in the middle of the room. Giant screens on each of the four walls tilt downward toward the audience.

Before playback, screens instruct guests to ‘sit, lay or lean anywhere.’ The layout encourages all three. The effect is part theatrical, part museum loop.

Surrender to the vibes

Kid A Mnesia ‘chronicles [Yorke and Donwoods] obsessions at the time: minotaurs, genocide, maps, globalization, monsters, pylons, damns, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes and ring roads.’

The film strings many of those obsessions into a loose narrative. A minotaur discovers and travels through a hidden world populated by strange colors and creatures. Plot specifics are elusive. The piece is built around atmosphere and unease as much as story.

Nigel Godrich is still the GOAT

Producer Nigel Godrich is credited for the film’s music. He has produced Radiohead albums since 1997’s OK Computer and Yorke’s three solo records. For the movie, Godrich created new mixes in spatial audio. Familiar songs are presented in different arrangements: some versions run longer, some shorter, and several add or remove instrumentation. The mixes refract known tracks without erasing their core.

Deep cuts get their due

Some of the exhibition’s musical highs land on less obvious moments. Godrich’s reworked ‘Treefingers’ becomes an ambient surround sound bath in the film. Amnesiac’s ‘Hunting Bears’ arrives with sun-fried guitars during a climactic hour that otherwise favors electronic textures. And for those who used ‘How To Disappear Completely’ for a bathroom break: shame on you.

Resonant a quarter-century later

Kid A and Amnesiac have long been framed around themes of consumerism, alienation, and technology. Twenty-five years on, the albums retain that framing. The exhibit recontextualizes the music amid recent global events: a pandemic, ongoing wars, economic turmoil, and the emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

The installation offers an expanded way to experience the Kid A and Amnesiac era. Students receive a 30% discount on Wednesdays. The exhibition will continue to tour through January 2027, with scheduled stops in Chicago, Mexico City, and San Francisco.