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.

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)

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)

Two years ago Fondazione Prada hosted a large-scale solo-show with works by the artist who repeatedly uses the Prada brand as the target for his artistic attacks. In 1998 he created his highly controversial Prada Deathcamp, a miniature replica of a concentration camp made from Prada’s distinctive navy blue hatboxes and emblazoned with the company logo (see picture below). The piece even included an entrance gate inscribed with the ominous motto’ Arbeit macht frei’ (that for Sachs, perhaps, equates to an advertising slogan?) and a model of the ‘incinerator’ from the Treblinka Nazi death camp.

According to the artist, however, Prada Deathcamp had nothing to do with the holocaust, but was instead intended to be a denouncement of the way shopping had been turned into a new form of religion. In an ironic twist of history, the very place where Sachs showed his “piece of resistance” will now be transformed by the architect who prophesied that “shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity”.

Design for Prada Foundation’s new headquarters by OMA

Prada Deathcamp (1998) by the American artist Tom Sachs

A one-metre high sculpture of a crucified frog, holding a mug of beer and an egg, at a modern art museum in Italy has stirred controversy in the predominantly Roman Catholic city of Bolzano. ‘Zuerst die Füße’ by the late German artist Martin Kippenberger is part of an exhibition at Bolzano’s Museion, which opened last May.

Kippenberg, who died in 1997 aged 44, was a painter, sculptor and photographer. Several exhibitions of his work have been held posthumously, including a show at the Tate Modern in London in 2006. His alter ego “Fred the Frog”, who appears on canvas and in sculpture alike, is at the same time a comic stand-in for Jesus, and as a spoof on all religious fervor. In this case Fred the Frog is hammered (literally and figuratively) to a crucifix with a beer stein in his hand.

No matter his cult hero status, the controversy around his sculpture continues unabated. As Der Standard reports, Franz Pahl—an elected government representative for the South Tyrol regional government—is continuing a hunger strike to protest the work’s continued exhibition at the museum’s new facilities According to the newspaper, Pahl promises to end his strike only when the sculpture is removed.

Read more on Artforum.com

Before the fall … Tracey Emin stands in front of Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez’s artwork Frauleins Christina, Panthea, Zenobia, Semiramis and Guinevere at the Royal Academy. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

In London and beyond, the incident has again raised the uncomfortable question of providing security for priceless art in public settings. Over the years a price has been paid for accessibility. In January 2006 a a man tripped over his shoelaces at the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge and smashed a magnificent Qing dynasty vase. And during the 70’s and 80’s a series of violent attacks on works of art took place.

One of the most scandalous attacks occurred in 1972, when a Hungarian man attacked Michelangelo’s ”Pieta” in St. Peter’s Basilica, striking it 10 times with a hammer. In 1975 Rembrandt’s ”Night Watch” was slashed with a bread knife at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Acid was thrown at another Rembrandt, ”The Danae” at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1985.

In 1986, a tall, brown-haired man walked into the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and repeatedly slashed ”Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III,” (see below) a masterpiece by the American artist Barnett Newman. He served five months in jail and three months on parole. However, in 1997 he returned to the museum and slashed another work by Newman with a small knife.

Barnett Newmans restored ‘Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III’ at the Stedelijk Museum.

Examples of damage caused by museum visitors, both accidentaly and purposely, are few and far between. Works of art stand a far greater chance of being destroyed at the hands of curators, picture handlers or cleaners. Most of the major museums have had to issue shame-faced apologies for breakages at one time or another.

In 2001, a delicate shell-shaped glass sculpture by the US artist Dale Chihuly, valued at £35,000, was smashed by a contractor setting up for an evening function at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Four years ago, a rubbish bag which formed part of an installation by Gustav Metzger, entitled Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art, was innocently gathered up by a cleaner at Tate Britain and thrown into a crusher.

Earlier this year, National Gallery handlers dropped a painting by the Renaissance artist Domenico Beccafumi. Made on a panel composed of three planks of timber, the painting broke along a joint. And at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York earlier this month, a security guard found a 15th-century terracotta relief sculpture of Saint Michael the Archangel by the Italian artist Andrea della Robbia on the floor; it had apparently come loose from its wall-mounted frame during the night. The masterpiece survived miraculously, but apparently not all museums have a guardian angel to protect their precious belongings.

Italian Renaissance sculptor Andrea della Robbia’s “Saint Michael the Archangel” fell off a wall at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and was damaged.

Read more in The Guardian, July 28 and July 30, 2008.

The notebook of one of Ireland’s most famous poets is one of thousands of objects in an exhibition titled “The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats” at the National Library of Ireland. Next to its display case the entire notebook has been digitally reincarnated. With the stroke of a finger on a touch screen, a visitor can flip through pages written 100 years ago and summon an image of this letter, or any other entry.

The exhibition is more like a life-size, walk-through Web site than an ordinary museum show. With audiotapes, four short films and software that brings light and breath to aging manuscripts, it amounts to a digital resurrection, allowing Yeats to stride again along the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries. You can also take a virtual tour of the exhibition by visiting the award-winning Yeats Exhibition homepage.

At its core the exhibition offers Yeats’s papers not as relics but as living documents. The visitor sees a manuscript of “Sailing to Byzantium”. Next to the display a digital tutorial shows how he kneaded the words and notions of the poem. Only in later drafts did he find a streak of lightning to open the poem: “That is no country for old men.” Elsewhere software developed by the British Library allows visitors to page through digitized manuscripts.

The exhibition has been described in The Irish Times as “one of the most important literary exhibitions yet staged internationally”. It opened in 2006 and will run until January, then move to the United States if the library can find a suitable host.

Read more (International Herald Tribune, July 21, 2008)

Kiasma is the sympathetic museum of modern art of Helsinki, built 10 years ago by architect Steven Holl. It has a remarkable position on one of the two main axes of Helsinki, near central station, Stockmann department store and mbar, hang out for skaters, hackers and (non-)hipsters. With 200.000 visitors annually, Kiasma is the most popular museum of Finland. With numerous skaters, goths, young tourists and drunk teenagers crowding the adjacent grass, it is also one of the coolest museums of Europe.

Kiasma celebrates urban culture by hosting the URB festival. Already in its ninth year, national and international makers of urban culture and art are presented in and outside of the museum, as installation, performance, website, workshop etc. This year URB will take place concurrently with Kiasma’s tenth-year anniversary exhibition, The Fluid Street.

One of the installations is the miniramp that opened to the public in June, with activities including skating, competitions, and skate lessons. The closing of the skating season, in turn, will be celebrated in typical Finnish style: sauna, ‘olut’ and skating on September 21st. The ramp has been created in cooperation with the Finnish Skateboarding Federation, and the ramp itself has been designed by Antti Yli-Tepsa. For those who cannot visit Helsinki this summer: the ramp will be back next summer.

Always dreamed of owning an architectural masterpiece? Since last April the Guggenheim Museum in New York is offering Restoration Rocks, a special edition jewelry line that incorporates actual historic fragments of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Guggenheim Museum. The jewelry line is sold exclusively at the Guggenheim Museum’s retail store and on its website, in anticipation of the museum’s 50th anniversary in 2009.

Designed and fabricated by California-based jewelry artist, Cara Tilker, the collection features nine different designs including earrings, pendants, bracelets, a ring, and cuff links. Lightweight concrete and Gunite remnants, set aside during the 2007 restoration process from the building’s walls, are presented in resin and sterling silver settings. The Restoration Rocks jewelry will be limited in quantity with retail prices ranging from $125.00 to $4,350.00.

As the original landmark building of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, approaches its fiftieth anniversary in 2009, aspects of its facade and rotunda structure are carefully restored. (Photo: David Heald)

Visit the Guggenheim Podcasts page to download an audio file about the exterior restoration. Learn more about the exterior restoration and on the Exterior Restoration page. The Building page provides a brief history of the Frank Lloyd Wright-building. Shop online for merchandise inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark building.

Read New York Times articles from 1991 and 2008 on the museum’s renovation.