There is little that feels concrete in Kid A Mnesia Exhibition. The abstraction is so... er... abstracted that it alienates the senses entirely. It's like staring at an AI-generated image of various vaguely-familiar kind-of shapes, even though there are no actual recognizable objects in the frame. Images break apart into dust, papers swirl around, words coalesce as graffiti on walls, but it is never altogether clear what the shape of this world truly is, only that it is extra-human. Impossible.

Then, tucked away in a small room on a tiny projector screen, you see Radiohead making music in a studio. A moment of calm in a chaos of free-associative viscera. The true, honest-to-god end-state of "music that you can listen to" is so deeply, fundamentally buried within the confines of Kid A Mnesia Exhibition that it almost doesn't exist. Kid A Mnesia Exhibition is, in a word, consciousness. It is the brain, the cathedral of creativity artists conjure to store all their ideas, the illusion of order that must be made out of the chaos so that mania does not take hold. There is a method to the madness, but it is, at the end of the day, still madness.

As an artist, I tend to lose myself in my creative vision. I get so strung up about what could be; the phenomenal shape of the unmade. I create grand tapestries in my mind, stories so grand that they contend with the infinite, unknowable emptiness of the void itself... but if I never put pen to paper, it means nothing. It's just thoughts. You have to do the thing so that the thing can be a thing. That's what Kid A Mnesia Exhibition feels like to me. The grand horror of the writer's-blocked mind made manifest.

Reviewed on Jul 30, 2023


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