The Big Steel Battalion Box
The Big Steel Battalion Box is based around the original Xbox game Steel Battalion. The fan-made cockpit is a faithful recreation of a Steel Battalion Mech console. Visitors can try their hand at the game as the unique display also adds effects such as rumblers and warning lights to enhance the experience. To aid in game play, a coach is allowed to help rookie pilots along during their game play from a special external coaching station that helps promote cooperative communication between players.
Chinese Historical Society Of America: Best For Personal Stories Of Immigration
Visitors can picture what it was like to be Chinese in San Francisco during the gold rush, transcontinental railroad construction and Beat heyday in this excellent museum, originally built as Chinatowns YWCA in 1932. Historians have unearthed some fascinating artifacts relating to the Chinese history of San Francisco, including 1920s silk qipao dresses, WWII Chinatown nightclub posters, and Frank Wongs Chinatown miniatures.
Exhibits feature personal insights and Chinese American perspectives on national milestones in history including the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, and the Chinese Exclusion Act, which officially excluded Chinese immigrants from US citizenship and civil rights from 1882 to 1943.
San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art
With San Franciscos Bay Area as a cornerstone of technological innovation, its major museum for modern and contemporary creation, SFMoMA could not but look into media arts. Accordingly, in 1987 it was one of the first US museums to establish its Media Arts Department, which does show through in the incredible quality of its collection including works of Julia Scher, Nam June Paik, Douglas Gordon, Dan Graham, Peter Campus, Gary Hill, Tatsuo Miyajima, Candice Breitz, Tacita Dean, Anthony McCall, Jim Campbell, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. In line with its 2001 exhibition 010101: Art in Technological Times, the museum retains its prevalence as reminds the upcoming show snap+share: transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks which will explore the importance of internet and networks in the production and diffusion of images starting March 30th.
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A Museum With No Art: Sf Exhibit Showcases The Rise Of Nfts
Three blocks from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where visitors can stand inches from a Georgia OKeefe or Henri Matisse painting, one of the citys newest gallery exhibitions features blank walls.
VERSE: Art of the Future opened in early February at the San Francisco Mint to showcase NFTs, the digital creations verified by blockchain technology that have shaken up the art world. There are no advertisements for the exhibition outside of the Mint, but a back-door entrance ushers museum goers into the basement. Neon signs with phrases like NFTs are fake and What is real? light up a long hallway where the exhibit is located. Empty rooms housing the NFT art, which can range from photographic images to video GIFs, branch outwards from the main walkway.
To view the pieces, visitors must download an augmented reality app and hold up their phone to scan the walls. For an additional price, they can use a virtual reality headset.
Ever since Mike Winkelmann, better known in the art world as Beeple, sold one of his NFTs shorthand for nonfungible tokens for $69 million at Christies, artists and art connoisseurs around the world have questioned how, or if, they should wade into the NFT space. For an auction house that has sold paintings from the likes of Van Gogh, Picasso and Monet, this record-breaking NFT sale sent tongues wagging.
While an NFT may give well-established artists like Turk an opportunity to experiment, for some creators its their entire practice.
The Rise Of Immersive Art
The lights were off, the air smelled faintly of roses, and New Age music flowed from room to room. TeamLab, a Japanese art collective of six hundred ultratechnologistsartists, software engineers, animators, and architectshad taken over an eighty-five-hundred-square-foot gallery at San Franciscos Asian Art Museum. Their interactive landscape, called teamLab: Continuity, promised a wondrous ecosystem of lush imagery drawn from nature and East Asian art. Animated projections of flowers, fish, and birds drifted across the walls and floor as visitors moved, the images reacted, creating ephemeral, mutating patterns. Butterflies, when touched, faded and crumpled blossoms and pine needles changed colors, or were swept aside. A woman tried to dodge a school of fish, which pooled and scattered around her boots. Looking around, I figured that the room was stuffed with sensors. My hand just went through a tadpole, a girl behind me said.
Later that afternoon, my friend called. He had seen the photos, and found them deeply strange. Theres something interesting about something so maximal falling so short, he said. The thing thats truly immersive is your phone.
Ever to confess youre boredmeans you have no
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Art That Includes You
The Museum of Illusions is one of the most fun museums around because it is fully interactive. Unlike a traditional museum experience, at the Museum of Illusions, you roam freely right through the creations so you can get up-close and personal with the gorgeously executed imagery. You will want to dive straight in to play and pose in our exhibits. Its rare for museums in San Francisco to give such uninhibited license to its patrons through its art. Because each persons interaction with the art is different, every experience is unique. In a sense, the observer is allowed to be the art.
Train Your Brain For Fun
Of all the museums you can visit in San Francisco, nowhere else will you see so many two-dimensional artworks that fool the observer, who views the work from a particular perspective only to see it transform into a mind-bending 3D scene. The fantasy scenes in our fun museum are in the style of the 3D street art you see in metropolitan centers around the world, gathered here under one roof. This is what makes a visit to our fun museum enchanting for people old and young.
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De Young Museum: Best For Globe
The de Youngs camouflaged, oxidized green exterior barely hints at the fantastic range of artistic wonders within. Exhibitions here boldly broaden artistic horizons, from ceremonial masks from Oceania and trippy hippie handmade fashions to James Turrells domed Skyspace installation, built into a hill in the sculpture garden.
Featuring African masks and Turkish kilims alongside California crafts and avant-garde American art, this cross-cultural collection has been expanding minds for a century. Rotating main-floor installations are riveting and diverse, from early Inuit carvings to documentary photography from US prisons. Access to the Osher Sculpture Garden is free, as is the 144ft observation tower with its 360-degree viewing room.
Go City San Francisco
Admission to many of the San Francisco art museums is included with the Go City pass. This is a multi-day, multi-attraction pass that saves you both time and money. It includes admission to more than 25 attractions in San Francisco and the surrounding areas.
Other popular attractions included with Go City are the California Academy of Sciences, the Exploratorium, and Aquarium of the Bay. Just a few of the free tours included with the pass are the Golden Gate Bay Cruise, the Oracle Park Tour, and a Wine Country Tour.
With this pass, you also receive discounts and value-added offers at many retailers and restaurants throughout the city. To keep track of all the offers included, you will receive a free full color guidebook when you buy the pass.
It is available for one, two, three, or five days, so you can purchase it just for the days you are visiting. Overall, you will only pay a fraction of the full price tickets for all of these attractions.
> > Find more details on this Go City pass
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Beall Center For Art + Technology
Affiliated with the University of California Irvine , the Beall Center for Art and Technology commits to the fostering of new relationships between art, science, and engineering, with obvious consideration for digital technologies and contemporary media arts. In 2000, its inaugural exhibition SHIFT_CTRL: Computers, Games, and Art curated by Antoinette Lafarge and Robert Nideffer broke grounds in analyzing gamings relation to technology. Since then the center has shown continuous dedication to research, exhibitions, and public programs. Arguably important was the 2009 solo show on Nam June Paiks later works from the 90s and after when he developed his body/robots. Other compelling exhibitions include Emergence: Art and Artificial Life , DataViz: Information as Art , as well as installations by Paul Vanouse, Golan Levin, Eddo Stern, and most lately R.Luke DuBois.
De Young Fine Arts Museum
The de Young Fine Arts Museum is another one of the popular San Francisco art museums.
Founded in 1895, the museum houses a number of pieces of American art from the 17th through 20th centuries. It also features art about Native Americans, Africa, and the Pacific.
Quick Facts: The de Young is located right across the way from the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. It’s a large space that occupies over 293,000 square feet and has an observation tower with 360-degree views.
Location: 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive in the Golden Gate Park
Cost: $15 for adults, $12 for seniors , $6 for college students with ID, Free for youth 17 and under $8 for the audio tour Additional charge for some special exhibits
Hours: Tuesday – Sunday: 9:30am – 5:15pm Open until 8:45pm on Fridays from mid-January through November Closed on Mondays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day Closes at 4 pm on December 24
Free Days: First Tuesday of every month Additional cost for some special exhibits.
Free Days Calendar: Find a full schedule of upcoming free days for all San Francisco art museums.
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Beat Museum: Best For Hipsters
The rise of the Beat movement in the 1950s was one of San Franciscos defining moments, and it’s lovingly celebrated at this North Beach museum. The 1000-plus artifacts in this collection of literary ephemera range from the sublime to the ridiculous the Jack Kerouac bobblehead dolls are definite head-shakers.
Downstairs, watch Beat-era films. Upstairs, pay your respects at shrines to individual Beat writers, and take a nostalgic ride on the wave of reinvention that carried San Francisco in the modern age.
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Hek Haus Der Elektronischen Knste
Digital videos, interactive installation, internet artworks, virtual reality, web game, computer animation or mixed media HeK is one fundamental institution specialized in digital culture and media technologies. The institution witnesses the creative and critical discourses that challenge the aesthetic, socio-political and economic framework through any new art forms indicative of the information age. Now running three solo shows on Swiss media art and winners of the 2018 Pax Art Awards !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Fragmentin, and Lauren Huret, the venue ambitions to preserve and promote the works of Swiss media artists. Meanwhile, the HeK also engages in shows of international reach most recently, Eco-visionaries, co-organized with the Bildmuseet, the MAAT, and the Laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, revealed how artists use new media and technology to raise environmental issues.
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Asian Art Museum: Best For Asian Culture
The most comprehensive collection of Asian art outside Asia covers 6000 years of history and thousands of miles of terrain. A trip through the galleries is a treasure-hunting expedition, from cutting-edge Japanese minimalism and seductive Hindu temple carvings to a jewel-box gallery of lustrous Chinese jade just dont bump into those priceless Ming vases!
The museums’ displays follow the evolution and migration of Asian art from West to East, along with Buddhist pilgrimage trails and trade routes toward San Francisco. If youre tight on time, follow the mapped trail of masterworks parents can pick up Explorer Cards for kids to find favorite animals and characters in the galleries.
Exploratorium: Best For Kids
Is there a science to skateboarding? Do toilets really flush counterclockwise in Australia? Combining science with art, San Franciscos dazzling hands-on Exploratorium challenges you to question how you know what you know. As thrilling as the exhibits is the setting: a 9-acre, glass-walled pier jutting out over San Francisco Bay, with vast outdoor areas you can explore for free.
The 600-plus exhibits have buttons to push, handles to crank and dials to adjust, all made by artists and scientists at the museums’ in-house workshops. With such fun activities as trying out a punk hairdo, courtesy of the static-electricity station, its one museum children wont want to leave.
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Legion Of Honor: Best For Museum
A museum as eccentric and illuminating as San Francisco itself, the Legion of Honour showcases a wildly eclectic collection spanning Monet’s water lilies and John Cage soundscapes, ancient Iraqi ivories and the counterculture comics of Robert Crumb. Upstairs are blockbuster shows of work from old masters and Impressionists, but dont miss the Legions Achenbach Foundation of Graphic Arts collection, which covers 90,000 works on paper, from drawings by Rembrandt to the graphic designs of Ed Ruscha.
The Legions setting rivals its art. There are dazzling views of the Pacific and trails lead to the Lands End Lookout with its arresting views of the Golden Gate. On a warm day, stroll on to the ruined Sutro Baths below the lookout, once San Francisco’s most stylish bathing area.
Yerba Buena Arts Museum
The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is one of the more interesting San Francisco art museums. The museum has no permanent art collection, but rather showcases special exhibits and performances.
Location: 701 Mission Street at 3rd Street in the SOMA District
Cost: $10 for adults 10% off for students and teachers, seniors, non-profit employees, and public transit riders Free for kids 5 and under, same-day performance ticket holders, and military with ID
Hours: Tuesday – Sunday: 11am- 6pm Closed Mondays and major holidays
Free Days: First Tuesday of the month
Transit to the Museum: This is another one of the centrally located San Francisco art museums. It is just a few blocks from Union Square in the heart of the SOMA District.
Insider Tips: The Yerba Buena Center for Performing Arts has a range of events, films, and other shows. Before visiting, check out their calendar for even more events during your stay: Yerba Buena website
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Museum Of Modern Art And Moma Ps1
It is in the 1960s that the MoMA started its pioneering collection of time-based art, followed in 2006 with the opening of a department dedicated to new media implementing specific exhibition modes and answering to the new preservation needs technology requires. After the exhibition Animations , and Thinking Machines Art and Design in the Computer Age, 19591989 , the museum will exhibit this spring a show on art and technology, reflecting on the interdependence between hardware and software, the physical and the immaterial. Its affiliated institution PS1 also contributes to the MoMAs authority in digital art, notably through the solo show of artists like Cao Fei and the organization of co-curated events like the Hong Kong group exhibition .com/.cn, which examined the role of the web in the rapid advancements of global trade and information exchange. Funny enough, in 2010 the MoMA has also been the stage for developments in augmented reality as artists from the collective Manifest.AR Mark Swarek, John Craig Freeman, Will Pappenheimer, Tamiko Thiel, Sander Veenhof hijacked the museum with their virtual installations, questioning the physical boundaries of traditional institutions with regards to the virtuality of digital art.
Victoria & Albert Museum
The V& A brings the most extensive collection in decorative arts and design worldwide, and it is only natural that the museum follows new ways of making art and design digitally. Its collections notably hold an excellent ensemble of computer artworks from the likes of Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr, Mark Wilson, Georg Nees, and A. Michael Noll all shown in 2018 during Chance and Control: Art in the Age of Computers which celebrated 50 years of computer-generated art. The museum also offers digital-focused residencies and organizes an annual Digital Design Weekend. On top of this, the V& A also heavily contributes to the appraisal of video games in art, as suggests its recent exhibition Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt that praised the fields edge in immersion and interactivity.
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Verse: The Art Of The Future
Verse: The Art of the Future is an exhibition featuring augmented reality holograms and artwork. Fully immerse yourself in the people, technology, and stories surrounding the NFT world!Tickets General Admission – includes entry to the experience for ages 12+ with a HoloLens 2 headset and mobile viewer valid for iPhone 7/iPad 2018 & later
- Child reduced admission
- Military admission
Exhibits At The Museum Of Art And Digital Entertainment
Exhibits at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment focus on video games, including those across a wide variety of consoles ranging from the earliest Atari, Coleco and Intellivision product to modern day consoles such as the Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii U. In addition, the museum also seeks to curate information about individual artist and game creators, including the projects they worked on, in an effort to educate the public and inspire future game makers and developers.
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Institute Of Contemporary Art
Many things can be said about the ICA, but first and foremost in terms of new media, it is where the groundbreaking exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity took place in 1968. Curated by Jasia Reichardt, the show challenges the role of the artist as they elaborate their designs on cybernetic devices, resulting in computer-generated music, graphics, texts or poems. As its director Stefan Kalmár points out, The ICA was created as an institute , for the contemporary and for all the arts which reflects perfectly well in the venues program and embrace of media arts, as well as its openness and curiosity for the new. These past few years the ICA has presented one show on forensic architecture, one on UK duo Metahaven, and another on Seth Price and the shift of emphasis from production to post-production, static presentation to circulation all connected to digital technologies. Now running is a solo exhibition by Scottish media artist Morag Keil who explores the impact of data-capitalism and digital technologies on people and their everyday realities.
