John O'Reilly
Culturelab
07.01

Images have always been central to Radiohead’s work. Their ‘blipverts’ took their examination of technology to another level.

There’s only one equivalent to Radiohead in the history of pop groups – Kraftwerk. At the musical core of both groups is a dedicated exploration of the effects of technology. It’s no accident. Kraftwerk’s machine music emerged at the height of post-war Germany’s industrial might. ‘I’m the operator with my calculator’ they sang about the exciting new technology of the time – Pocket Calculator. Radiohead’s sound has evolved in the post-industrial culture of Britain’s digital economy.

If the image of the robotic clone was key to our appreciation of Kraftwerk, in the age of the computer Radiohead have removed themselves completely from the picture. Even when they appeared in the famous videos by Jonathan Glazer, such as "Street Spirit", the location and place of the band seemed otherworldly. There was already a sci-fi element to Glazer’s picturing of the song "Street Spirit" where Thom Yorke confronts his own double, and band members seem to flip over backwards in time. Glazer believes ‘There is a dreamscape to their music which inspires images. This gives their music an intimate relationship to the audience.’

OK Computer, Kid A and now Amnesiac have magnified this dreamscape. Both musically and visually Radiohead are now picturing the dreamscape of the new technological revolution. You can hear it most obviously in songs like "Fitter Happier" whose vocals were generated by a software program and sounded like Stephen Hawking. You can see it in Stanley Donwood’s hand-crafted sleeve design, with its anxious images of the barren, of anonymous non-places like airports, and in the words ‘Lost Child’ on the cover of OK Computer. And you see it in the ‘Blipverts’ by Chris Bran and Shynola.

Rather than opting for state-of-the-art designers and video directors, Radiohead have chosen people to visualise their work who stretch and bend older technology. As Richard Kenworthy from Shynola observes ‘Donwood has a similar approach to us he uses technology in weird ways, maybe doing funny things you aren’t supposed to do with it’.

Shynola have created the animated video for the "Pyramid Song", the single from Amnesiac. It is Radiohead’s first conventional video promo for 4 years. As Kenworthy explains ‘There was quite a lot of pressure. They hadn’t had a proper video since OK Computer. It helped that we had already done the blips and had a working relationship’.

The blipverts for Kid A which were shown on TV ad breaks is a medium for condensing and compressing time. On the Radiohead site, where you can download them, they are called anti-adverts. If they are anti-adverts it’s because by compressing information they short-circuit the sales message of the conventional advert. With intense bursts of visual and audio data the blipverts create a temporary autonomous zone, releasing the viewer from the dreamworld of commercials.

As Richard Kenworthy says ‘They jolt you out of blandness. The blip isn’t trying to sell you anything. It just takes you to a different world. We were given all the artwork by Stanley Donwood. He makes it at the same time of the album. You could download them all from the internet. People began to collect them all like Pokemon’.

Shynola themselves don’t chase the latest design technology. They rework basic stuff. ‘We have 2 PCs each and a couple of extra ones for rendering. And they are just PCs we have built ourselves so we can make them to our own specifications. We use software like After Effects, Photoshop and Premiere. They are all pretty basic packages. We don’t have anything like Flame. We use and abuse the computer in an unusual way’.

The perspective of Shynola on design technology mirrors that of Radiohead. It’s about exploring and inventing our own relationship with technology. American sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick wrote a story called Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? They dream of a new world. They dream of Radiohead Blipverts.