Next to Seattle's towering Space Needle, a strange and unsettling architectural form is rapidly taking shape. Cast in hot-rod colors, composed of waving, asymmetrical walls, Frank Gehry's daring interactive museum, the Experience Music Project (EMP), seems like a huge multicolored fungus growing irresistibly out of the cityscape. Others have compared it to a giant Play-Doh doodle, a metallic hedgehog, and even a human ear. Created by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and his sister Jody Patton as both a musical education complex and a giant shrine to local hero Jimi Hendrix, the $100 million EMP (which will open this summer) is the most startling of a new generation of museums that are veering away from traditional modes of displaying artifacts toward a brave new curatorial world of computer-generated "interactivity."

Interactive museums, characterized by a sometimes brash and loopy mix of commercialism and high-tech exhibition space, are springing up all over the country, often celebrating not the past but the present of Amer-ican popular culture: from Virginia's Newseum to the Grateful Dead's prospective Terrapin Station in San Francisco, from numerous science museums such as the Museum of Innovation in San Jose to the various halls of fame. The new museums are sometimes more akin to dazzling amusement arcades or electronic playgrounds than to the somber and solidly physical dignities of the Met. Visitors are called upon to play, participate, and buy, rather than contemplate. Some curators, indeed, question whether they are really museums at all and not entertainment complexes with a loose educational veneer.

What marks the EMP as a possible turning point for interactive museums, though, is both the prestige of Gehry himself and the sheer radicalism and scale of his design. To accommodate Allen's demands that the complex be gritty, industrially informal, and true to what he calls the "swoopy" spirit of rock, Gehry came up with a sculptural, no-holds-barred design that is so ambitiously eccentric, it needs revolutionary engineering technologies to build. (See "Anatomy of a Skin," page 95).

On its Web page (www.experience.org), the EMP shows the visitor both Gehry's finished models and a cam shot of the building site itself. The model, at first sight, looks like a blown-up sports car, all aerodynamic curves and undulating lines. It seems to be divided into colored sections of silver, blue, purple, red, and gold. These colors, according to the designers, are derived from classic electric guitars--the red and blue are from the Fender Stratocaster and the gold from the Gibson Les Paul--while the purple recalls the hallucinatory hue of Hendrix's most famous song. The effect is deliberately trippy.

Craig Webb, a senior associate in Gehry's Santa Monica-based firm and the project's designer, says that the EMP marks a new stage in the meshing of technology with the architecture of museums. In particular, he says, the design team tried to come up with a building that perfectly expressed the spirit not only of rock music, but of high-tech interactivity as well. "Designing a definite physical architecture around an abstract interactive mission," he says, "is certainly difficult. We started out by designing traditional galleries, but then we changed direction. What we ended up with is quite unlike anything that has ever been built before. It's a sort of huge computer tent--in fact, it contains more computers per square foot than any building in the world.

" And is there a conflict between this vast array of computer technology and the architecture itself? "There could be," says Webb, after a pause. "But there isn't."

The end result of this bold process will certainly be unabashedly swoopy. At its center stands the Sky Church, an 85-foot-high multimedia concert venue adorned with a gigantic frieze of changing images. Underfoot, there are time capsules glowing in the floor, filled with objects donated by bands featured in the museum.

The galleries at the core of the museum are carefully themed. There's a Hendrix gallery, of course, and then one called the Quest for Volume, which takes visitors through the history of the electric guitar. Different guitar models will be displayed with recordings of artists playing on them. Next is a gallery called Northwest Passage that will chart the history of local music in the Northwest from Ray Charles' vinyl debut, recorded in 1949, to Hendrix and Robert Cray, and then Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana. In addition, the Milestones gallery, consisting of four interconnected exhibit areas, will offer an overview of rock and roll history, including what is billed (somewhat frightfully) as "a trip into the world of fandom."

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the EMP is an entity called the Sound Lab, an area where visitors can actually make music themselves. The Sound Lab will provide tutorials to aspiring musicians on everything from jam sessions to making a record. They will learn how to mike a drum set, mix a recording, "perform" on a mock stage rigged to feel like a live concert--or just dance. There will even be an interactive hip-hop DJ installation.

But what, one might ask, will a visitor actually learn about music?

"Well, this is not a museum where you look at objects," says Ann Farrington, the EMP's director of exhibits, rather firmly. "It's a place where you meet your own creativity." The EMP will eventually comprise two roofs, an inner concrete shell, and a huge colored wall. An auditorium is also planned, as well as a restaurant and an in-house nightclub. There is even talk of a radio station. All in all, it will probably be more like visiting a gigantic version of Toys-R-Us than a museum.

Andrea Weatherhead, curator of interactive galleries, explains that the Sound Lab, for example, will not be a "passive experience" for visitors. "We wanted to create a totally new kind of interactivity," she says. "Usually, you're just dealing with a screen, so it's re-purposed information. But we wanted something tactile, where you're actually grabbing something, using your body. We originally wanted to have people use their own body as a drum set! I call our installations electromechanical interactives."

Max Cameron, who worked as the exhibits project manager at the EMP between 1995 and 1997, helped develop the Sound Lab. "Music interactives," he says, "are always hard to do. And though I loved working with Gehry, there was always this question of how such a cathedral-like space could give people the intimacy you need to make music. Then there are the programs. Do you dumb them down? Or do you make them really challenging? Psychologically, it's very delicate."

Around the drum circle will be circles of "platforms" arranged in threes and divided by open glass partitions. Each platform will contain an instrument that the visitor can pick up and start playing; one platform can be connected to the other two, and a session can get under way. In addition, 12 separate "sound pods" (individual acoustically sealed rooms) will offer complete musical privacy. "The whole thing," says Weatherhead with some finality, "is designed to be experiential."

Experiential or not, many museum curators feel that fashionable and constantly hyped interactivity is a double-edged sword. Museums are increasingly under pressure to search out sponsors (who sometimes turn out to be Silicon Valley giants) and to make themselves into gaudily entertaining ornaments of the Information Age. Neither of these is necessarily a good thing. Indeed, the rush to embrace computer gizmos may obfuscate the museum's essential purpose, which is to bring us into a contemplative, intimately physical relation with the past. Al-though many corporate-funded institutions bristling with computer screens like the EMP call themselves "museums," the word itself, some fear, may be turning into something of a gimmick.

"The whole virtue of a museum," says Aaron Betsky, curator of design at San Francisco's Mu-seum of Modern Art, "is that it removes objects from everyday use and so makes you look at them. It's the distance from everyday life that is valuable. It reminds us that we can't consume everything. The museum is not entertainment, after all. It's something else. And if we lose sight of that, why use the word museum at all?"

Samuel Sachs II, director of the very traditional Frick Collection in New York and ironically one of the leading authorities on interactive museum technology, also fears that interactivity is blunting the art of looking at objects. "If overused, I think it can be terribly distracting and enervating," says Sachs, who nevertheless admits that virtual technologies can sometimes be useful in making undisplayed artifacts available to visitors. "Screens are often simply mind-numbing. We seem to have forgotten that there is a crucial difference between information and knowledge. Let alone entertainment. Learning to look at real things is not the same as playing with information."

Dorothy Dunne, head of education at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, agrees. "To actually see things is something of an art which one learns as a child. And that is precisely the educational power of the museum. The latter is bound to bring us face-to-face with artifacts themselves, not cyber-representations of them. "

Yet according to the EMP design teams, it was the intangible abstractness of their subject matter that justified a bold interactive approach in the first place. "The interactive approach is perfect for us," says Farrington, "because our artifacts are not physical. Our subject matter, after all, is sound." Gehry's "breathing sculpture" of a building, she adds, puts this mission into an appropriate architectural setting: "The building has the energy, the aggression, and the rhythm of music itself."

Yet tensions over interactivity and its goals certainly surfaced during the EMP's long gestation. One designer who worked on the project early on and who wishes to remain anonymous, says that the original aspiration to create an idealistic temple to American popular culture became lost in the fortress mentality of powerful corporativism: a paradox that Paul Allen carries within himself. "Their thinking became closed, proprietary, competitive, and totally geared towards money and commodification. It was not what I signed up for."

None of this, however, means that interactives are always merely the ancillas of corporate profit. Many erstwhile skeptics agree that there is at least one place that makes exceptional use of educational interactives: the science museum. These institutions have long been interactive, often with very low technology. And as it happens, it is such science museums that have clearly inspired the creators of the EMP.

According to Weatherhead, the closest thing to the EMP among existing museums is the Exploratorium, the experimental science museum in San Francisco that now hosts 650 interactive exhibits such as the Tactile Dome, the Turbulent Orb, and the the Tornado (a vortex of fog that you can enter). There is also an area called the Play Lab, where visitors can observe their toddlers messing about with mirrors, blocks, and talking tubes, and, as the brochure rather quackily puts it, see "how gender differences are reinforced during play." You can also learn how to make origami, create your own cartoons, and watch a live demonstration of a cow's heart being dissected. No one, she argues, would claim that such a museum wasn't educational.

But, others say, that depends how it is done.

Paola Antonelli, an architecture and design curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, fondly remembers igniting a high-voltage-discharge machine that looked like something out of the movie Metropolis at Milan's Science and Technology museum when she was a child. "It was the most dusty, archaic machine you can imagine," she says. "And it was thrilling. In science museums this kind of primitive interactivity was a great bonus. But today the high-tech glitz is often a cover for a void of imagination. A goal in itself rather than the means to an end."

In addition to science museums, however, radical new museum designs, such as that of the Arlington, Virginia, Newseum--an institution dedicated to the news that opened in 1997--have also provided inspiration for the EMP. Aside from more traditional exhibits like Charles Dickens' fountain pen, the Newseum boasts a dazzling "News Room" where visitors can play at being stressed-out reporters (for reasons known only to themselves).

Christopher Miceli, senior designer at New York's Ralph Appelbaum Associates who put together the Newseum's exhibits, dismisses the skeptics and claims that interactivity is indeed the wave of the curatorial future. "We set out," he says, "to enable visitors to choreograph their own journeys through history. It's a complete reversal of the traditional museum where you're looking at dusty objects in cases. We wanted to reflect this change in the name itself. It's half recognizable museum, half something else."

Objects, adds Miceli, can now be looked at in dozens of new ways: as cross-sections, with de-tails enlarged, full of tactile intimacy. "The interactive technology," he goes on, "is definitely changing the way museums are being thought out, because it can create highly flexible environments. It's more things to more people. And while it's expanding the intellectual basis of museums, it's also increasing enormously their amounts of disposable space. From now on, museums can grow without actually increasing their physical space."

But a vexing question poses itself. If the mu-seum doesn't choreograph one's journey through history, how does the visitor do it if he knows almost nothing? And what, for that matter, will the visitor actually learn about even recent musical history as he bangs out primal rhythms in a drum circle, fondles virtual images of Hendrix mementos, or twangs away in a sound pod? The aim here would appear to be more a matter of momentary exhilaration than of educational profundity. Indeed, cynics might say, the whole concept of learning that underpins much of this interactivity seems eminently suited to kindergarten. Learning is fun; it's a mode of play. Why, then, shouldn't museums be like high-tech playgrounds?

But then again, perhaps that is to miss the EMP's point.

Craig Webb, for one, willingly accepts that the EMP is far from being a museum in any traditional sense. "Perhaps," he suggests, "the word emuseum' isn't the right one anymore. Perhaps we need a new word to describe the learning installations of the twenty-first century." And he adds, "I wonder if there could even be a emuseum' built around someone like Jimi Hendrix. In a way, I hope not. I sort of think he would have approved of what we've built."

Lawrence Osborne is the author of Paris Dream-book and The Poisoned Embrace.