Developed by the Barbican Museum in London, Game On examines videogames from the game design process, to the culture among gamers and beyond. Visitors can experience the past forty years of electronic gaming, play over 100 games on their original hardware and using the software that would have been used at the time.

The Game On exhibit has been seen by more than 1 million people and has toured venues such as London’s Science Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and, most recently, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, Australia. Future venues include the State Library of Queensland, Australia.

Video games have been entertaining people for decades but in a move some may see as surprising, now museums and libraries are preserving and celebrating them as cultural artefacts. Still, there are only a handful of other significant public collections of games and gaming hardware in the world, such as those at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Berlin’s Computer Games Museum and the Computer History Museum in San Francisco.

Stanford University’s Henry Lowood is one of the few experts working to preserve video games and their culture. “Since the late 20th century, cultural history includes digital game culture,” Professor Lowood says. “It is not only the case that the history of this medium will be lost if we do not preserve the history of digital games, but also that we will not be able to provide a complete cultural history of this period.”

In reference to a recent article in the Sydney Morning Heral, as posted on Stanford Humanities Lab weblog.

On 25 September n8 will organise the Open Museum symposium at PICNIC ‘08. Speakers will be announced shortly, but information is trickling down.

n8 has decided to organise Open Museum, a one-day symposium within the PICNIC Festival focussing on the opening up of museums and the enveloping dialogue with its visitors and audience. How can museums employ new media to enhance their visitor’s experience and their collections’ accessibility? And how can new media employ museums to take distance from current affairs and immediate needs? A selection of international speakers will represent the forefront of current developments in this field, both from within museums and from technology and media.

We hope to see you there.

H BOX installation view at Tate Modern in London (Photo: jamesapallister)

Mobile galleries are a current fad sweeping exhibition hubs around the world, like a travelling circus for the cultural crowd. It started with Chanel’s Mobile Art Pod and continues apace with French luxury brand Hermes’ H BOX: a travelling screening space for newly commissioned video art. After the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Musac in Léon and Mudam in Luxembourg, H BOX is currently making a stopover at Tate Modern’s turbine hall, before it will travel to the Yokohama Triennale in Japan.

Designed by artist, architect and designer Didier Fiuza Faustino, the unique structure hosts a rotating, diverse programme of commissioned videos by Alice Anderson, Yael Bartana, Sebastián Díaz-Morales, Dora García, Judit Kúrtag, Valérie Mréjen, Shahryar Nashat, and Su-Mei Tse.

Consisting of two entirely collapsible modules constructed of aluminium and plexiglas, H BOX can be assembled, disassembled and transported as required. Ten people at a time fit into the screening room, which shows the eight videos in succession. The cutting-edge sound and image technology draws viewers deep into the projected art.

H BOX runs till August 17 at Turbine Hall Bridge, Tate Modern, London.

Interior of H BOX at Tate Modern in London. still from film - midway by judit kurtag, 2007 (Photo: jamesapallister).

Watch a clip from the film by Dora Garcia, a Spanish-born, Brussels-based artist, whose work combines video, writing and performance. (Wallpaper.com)

Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times

In the new $25 million Audubon Insectarium, which opened in June, you can watch Formosan termites eat through a wooden skyline of New Orleans (as if this city didn’t have enough problems), stick your head into a transparent dome in a kitchen closet swarming with giant cockroaches and watch dung beetles plow their way through a mound of waste.

And then you can engage in the museum’s most brilliant interactivity by joining in the line of eager visitors prepared to munch on a handful of crunchy Cajun-fried crickets or scoop up some wax-worm stir fry. Can you imagine eating roasted lion at a zoo or filleted dolphin at an aquarium? But here the admired creatures are served in elaborate dips and sautéed dishes.

Photo: Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times

Read more: New York Times (August 2, 2008)