The ZKM Media Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany

Museums are not all historical artefacts and flat displays: that’s what I discovered for sure when I visited the ZKM Media Museum in Karlsruhe, south-west Germany.

The ZKM (in German, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, or Centre for Art and Media) opened in an old weapons building in 1999. As well as being a center for research, its Media Museum prides itself on being the first and only museum for interactive art.

So what exactly is interactive art? It’s something like a mix between a hands-on science museum and a regular art gallery. The ZKM shows a combination of internet applications, interactive film, simulation games and mixed media sculptures, and there’ll be plenty there that you’ve never seen before.

While the ground floor's emphasis is more on changing exhibitions, the middle floor is home to some of my favorite experiences. Imagine a projection of bubbles onto a tall wall. Pictures of soapy bubbles of different sizes are floating randomly down towards the floor. But step in front of them and – if you’re gentle – you can influence the path that these bubbles take. It’s quite incredible, but if you line the shadow of your hand up with the projection on the wall and carefully coax a bubble in a different direction, it responds. If you’re too rough, it’s just as likely to pop. If you're more into words, you can see a wall full of pager-displays that use a bank of nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs to create random sentences that seem English (and German) but just don't quite make sense.

Other great exhibits include a dark room with a fractal geometry projection covering a table in the middle: if you move the supplied mouse around the edges of the shape, speakers around you produce spooky and ever-changing sounds. It’s not quite music, but it’s quite addictive. There’s also a room with a Japanese teahouse projected onto the wall – if you wait, a small Japanese child will open the door and run inside. In the meantime, you can “read” a book using a special pen that, among other things, will help you take bites out of a digital apple until just the core remains.

On the top floor, you’ll find a great range of “historic” computers: from the first Atari systems through to slightly less archaic (but still dinosaur) IBMs. They’ll either be new to you (that makes you young) or you’ll remember which one was the first contact you had with computers. Some of them are still set up to play classic games like Donkey Kong or Pacman.

The ZKM Media Museum is located at Lorenzstraße 19 in Karlsruhe, south-west Germany. If you’re traveling with the local Strassenbahn (tram), you can take Line 2 in the direction of Siemensallee and get off at the ZKM stop right outside the museum. Those coming by car will see “ZKM” signs shortly after the Autobahn exits for Karlsruhe. Be aware that it’s usually closed on Mondays and Tuesdays; from Wednesday to Friday it opens between 10am and 6pm, and on weekends daily opening times are 11am to 6pm.