by Caleb Johnson on February 15, 2011 at 03:00 PM

Despite what Roger Ebert has said about video games not being art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. will host an entire exhibition next year dedicated to the medium. 'The Art of Video Games,' which runs from March 16th, 2012 to September 9th, will feature interviews with several artists and developers, game footage spanning 40 years, a thorough history of gaming consoles, ...
by Amar Toor on February 12, 2011 at 09:00 AM

Google's Art Project may allow you to visit London's National Gallery and Florence's Uffizi Gallery, but if you want to gaze at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel from your living room, you'll have to head to the Vatican's website. There, you'll be able to spend your whole afternoon staring at Michelangelo's masterpiece, rendered in a beautiful, high-resolution panorama. Your virtual visit will ...
by Amar Toor on February 2, 2011 at 02:50 PM

Poland is home to a handful of museums at former Nazi concentration camps, but the country's culture minister doesn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about who put them there to begin with.
Yesterday, Bogdan Zdrojewski told the Polish news agency PAP that he'd written to the directors of three World War II-era museums in the country, asking them to drop the ".pl" suffix from their URLs. The ...
by Caleb Johnson on February 1, 2011 at 11:30 AM

Google Street View has known its share of controversy and embarrassment in the past, but a new project could do wonders for the virtual tour-guide application's reputation.
Google has partnered with 17 international art museums to provide virtual walking tours of their legendary halls. By visiting the Google Art Project, art fans can roam the halls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, ...
by Amar Toor on January 27, 2011 at 10:00 AM

Thousands of historical photos and documents from the Holocaust are now available online, thanks to a collaborative project from Google and Israel's Yad Vashem memorial. The initiative, which launched yesterday, will allow users to search through 130,000 photos from the Jerusalem-based institute, which houses the world's largest collection of Holocaust documents. With the help of experimental ...
by Amar Toor on November 17, 2010 at 08:30 AM

Within the next few weeks, a man named Wafaa Bilal will undergo surgery on his head -- not to address any neurological malady or troublesome tumor, but to implant a small camera on the back of his noggin. Bilal, a new media artist and assistant professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, is going through the procedure as part of a project called 'The Third I.' For one year, the Iraqi professor's ...
by Warren Riddle on October 15, 2010 at 06:30 AM

Technology, particularly the Internet and social networking, allows NASA to engage space enthusiasts through an expanding assortment of entertaining and educational interactive programs. Space geeks can read tweets from astronauts, launch their face into orbit, help map the moon, participate in research projects and -- now -- earn virtual moon rocks, spacesuits, shuttles and (awesomely absurd) ...
by Switched Staff on October 8, 2010 at 05:30 PM

In his study of the 'uncanny,' Sigmund Freud writes, "The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar." Through repression, Freud argues, the once-safe becomes foreign, disturbing, uncanny. Freudian thought influences Tony Oursler's newest pieces, debuting jointly at the Adobe Museum of Digital Media and at Lehmann-Maupin (IRL, no less). ...
by Caleb Johnson on August 22, 2010 at 05:08 PM

With the final launch dates set for space shuttles Discovery and Endeavour, NASA's next job will be finding homes for these hulking, retired spacecrafts, and for the Atlantis and Enterprise, as well. According to The Wall Street Journal, about 21 institutions have asked NASA for the right to store and showcase one of the four remaining U.S. space shuttles. However, few of them can likely afford ...
by Terrence O'Brien on August 13, 2010 at 05:20 PM

Just a few dozen miles north of the Switched headquarters, in Beacon, New York, lies the Retro Arcade Museum, a storefront on the corner of Main and Schenk Streets loaded with the sorts of vintage arcade goodies that would make even the most steel-willed nerd weep. But an archaic law, one that is more widespread than you might believe, has caused the life's work of Fred Bobrow to be shut down, at ...
by Matthew Zuras on June 14, 2010 at 01:30 PM

Well, the Internet has won. The last exclusive, nigh-impenetrable institution known as the art world has buckled to the social media cloud. The New York Times reported yesterday that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has joined forces with YouTube to create a user-driven biennial of video art, to be exhibited at all four of the Guggenheim's global outposts. The project, called YouTube Play, ...
by Caleb Johnson on September 23, 2009 at 02:09 PM

You probably don't think da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa' and the classic video game 'Pong' have anything in common, but, a group of French gamers believes the two share plenty of traits. BBC News reports that a group called MO5 is calling on the government to establish a retro gaming museum because, according to spokesman Philippe Dubois, "[We] are in danger of losing our inheritance of video game ...
by Warren Riddle on July 9, 2009 at 10:15 AM

While cloning is still in its infancy, the Canon corporation is doing the next best thing to genetically reproducing departed species: virtually recreating them. According to DVICE, the global imaging company, which has also designed a virtual aquarium exhibit, is developing a museum show in Chiba, Japan called "Dinosaurs -- Miracles of the Desert."
Wearing virtual reality goggles, visitors to ...
by Terrence O'Brien on February 12, 2009 at 09:16 AM

Who doesn't love 'Pong?' Nobody, that's who. That's why we just had to tell you about the Pong Museum, a Web site dedicated to all things 'Pong.' The museum opened its virtual doors on January 27 to celebrate the 40th(ish) anniversary of 'Pong' and the Magnavox Odyssey (the first commercially available video game system). Along with a detailed history of the game and all of its various ...
by Terrence O'Brien on May 10, 2007 at 01:57 PM

Dell is officially history. No, no, no... the Texas-based computer manufacturer hasn't declared bankruptcy -- it's been inducted into the Smithsonian. Michael Dell has donated a small collection of items to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, including his employee badge, a current model PC and one of the first computers he ever sold in 1985 under the brand name PC Limited. ...