Museum visitors can step back in time and tour a 1950's all-electric house.

Visitors can explore a Chinese House that was once located 11,000 miles away in a rural village near Shanghai.

Museum guests can visit a forested park and wander among tree ferns, waterfalls, and caves.

These experiences are offered by the Johnson County Museum (Shawnee, KS); The Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA); and Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington, NZ), respectively. Exciting, educational, and memorable, they are among these museums' signature experiences. Once ticketed to any of these museums, one can tour the indoor galleries and at some point, venture outside the museum to enjoy these destination attractions. These outdoor exhibitions are accessible only after visitors have entered the museum proper.

In the All-electric House, you can smile at the memorably stylish furnishings of the 1950s and contemplate how the suburban lifestyle – with all its modern conveniences – was marketed to those who originally toured the model home. In Yin Yu Tang – a Chinese House, you can discover a rare example of Chinese architecture and learn about the daily life the Huang family, who resided in the house for over 200 years. In Bush City, you can wander a re-created natural area replete with indigenous plants and geological specimens. And when you’re finished with any of these, you can return to the mother ship museum and take in other exhibits, spend time in the gift shop, or enjoy refreshments.

These types of exhibitions represent, what I call, on-site excursions. I find that these “in-then-out-then-back-in” exhibitions offer a great sense of value, a refreshing change of scenery, a breath of fresh air, and an immersive contrast to the formal museum. They break up a typical visit structure and reduce fatigue. Also, many museums offer them under a separate ticket, and as such, they are revenue generators. I think they're a good idea.

The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) has launched FreePort, its newest contemporary art initiative, with a commission by internationally renowned artist Charles Sandison.

Figurehead, which opened 2 October 2010, activates handwritten words from 18th-century ship logs and journals, creating an immersive environment of swirling, luminous language. Inspired by PEM's 18th-century origins in global trade, Sandison gives poetic visual form to the thoughts and aspirations of America's first global entrepreneurs in East India Marine Hall. The elegant neoclassical room — PEM's original display hall — features immense sculptures from the prows of vessels that once set sail from Salem harbor.

Working at the intersection of visual art and computer programming, he uses his own customized software to map trajectories around the room; the projected images respond to algorithms that guide their behavior. In Figurehead, Sandison's algorithms draw on real-time weather data from the internet, making the installation organic and ever-evolving.

Here's a rather bad mobile phone video I shot at the opening event. It's of pretty bad quality, but you can get an idea for how immersive the installation is.

Organized by PEM's curator of contemporary art, Trevor Smith, the installation is the first in a series of projects inviting artists to establish a unique dialogue with the museum and its visitors. "Each year, we'll work with artists and our audience to explore the effects of global give-and-take on our culture," says Smith. "For over 200 years," Smith says, "PEM has been tracing the ways in which trade, exchange and translation drive cultural change. This is something unique to our museum. These are also the questions that contemporary art explores."