Radiohead has never been a band content to simply release music, they build worlds. With PolyFauna, the group once again blurred the line between art, technology, and consciousness.
Developed in collaboration with design studio Universal Everything, PolyFauna is a mobile app inspired by the sessions for The King of Limbs and built around the sonic landscape of the song “Bloom.” It’s less a game or a traditional interactive experience, and more an ambient ecosystem, an evolving visual and auditory field that reacts to touch, motion, and presence.
Users explore an abstract environment of swirling forms, shifting colors, and organic soundscapes. Guided only by a floating red dot, the experience is meditative and surreal, a living sketch of Radiohead’s imagination rendered in code.
At its core, PolyFauna draws from early computer life experiments and the idea of subconscious creation. It’s an experiment in digital ecology, one where users don’t consume art, they inhabit it. The screen becomes a portal into a generative dream state, where every gesture ripples through a synthetic world built on rhythm and randomness.
While PolyFauna may not reach the narrative complexity of Björk’s Biophilia or the technical innovation of Arcade Fire’s Just a Reflektor, it stands apart in its quiet ambition. It’s not about control or achievement, but surrender, a reminder that in Radiohead’s universe, interaction is another form of listening.
Thom Yorke announced the launch of the app via a blog post on February 11th:
We have made an app called PolyFauna.
PolyFauna is an experimental collaboration between us (Radiohead) & Universal Everything, born out of The King of Limbs sessions and using the imagery and the sounds from the song Bloom.
It comes from an interest in early computer life-experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious.
Your screen is the window into an evolving world.
Move around to look around.
You can follow the red dot.
You can wear headphones.
ACTIONABLE!NSIGHTS
- Mash-up: Radiohead × Universal Everything
- Creative Medium: Music as interactive art
- Digital Behavior: Exploration as participation
- Experience Design: Generative environments
- Cultural Intersection: The subconscious meets code