H BOX at Orange County Museum of Art

I have seen the future of the video art museum, and it is the H BOX.

Of course, when I see the H BOX, I also feel I’m looking at a phantom from the past, something from a never-released episode of “Lost in Space” in which this equally dorky/cool-looking intergalactic module drops from the sky and changes everyone’s perspective. As I doubt that the French luxury house of Hermes, which has underwritten the H BOX, will quite appreciate the admiring connotation of that most American adjective “dorky,” let’s focus instead on the cool part. Beginning today at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, the H BOX, a mobile screening room built to present commissioned video art, arrives in the U.S. for the first time.

Unveiled at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in November 2007, the H BOX has so far been at the Tate Modern in London, as well as shows in Spain, Luxembourg and Japan. Its American debut runs through Sept. 27. It was designed by Portuguese artist-architect Didier Fiuza Faustino, financed by Hermes and built by a French company, Euro-Shelter, which branched out from its typical business of developing mobile medical units for military use.

The result? A retro-looking, Tomorrowland-ish construction, built of throwback substances of aluminum and acrylic plastics, that paradoxically conveys us forward into the aesthetics of the Digital Age. It’s a classic feint, almost haiku:

Form looks backward while

functionalities take us

into the future.

If you get invited to an H BOX assembly party, I’d say, go. The gizmo would arrive at the courtyard or parking lot of your local museum in 117 pieces, give or take a part or two (H BOX artistic director Benjamin Weil isn’t quite sure of the exact number). It comes with its own technician: I envision a fastidious Ferrari mechanic, sporting a clean, white jumpsuit -- a solemn version of Peter Sellers, circa 1965. The technician needs about three days to assemble the H BOX and, voila, you’ve got the coolest video display instrument this side of Bill Viola.

As to what makes it go, Weil offers a deprecatory chuckle and describes another traditional technology where the past powers the future. “It’s plug and play -- turn it on in the morning and turn it off at night, that’s about it.”

The unit -- which comfortably holds as many as 10 watchers at a time -- is at OCMA as the final element of a chronologically arranged presentation called “The Moving Image: Scan to Screen, Pixel to Projection.” Organized by Karen Moss, the museum’s deputy director for exhibitions and programs, it taps into the institution’s extensive permanent collection of electronic media art and captures the development of the form over the last 50 years.

“This show starts with works by pioneers like John Baldessari and the Ant Farm collective . . . through ‘80s and ‘90s figures like Viola and Spalding Gray . . . and into the early days of the Internet Age,” says Moss.

Hermes has commissioned 12 works so far for the H BOX, four a year, at 25,000 euros (currently equal to about $33,500) apiece. The videos are from three to 14 minutes each and are shown together as part of a loop that takes 90 minutes to run.

As Moss concisely puts it: “The H BOX is a punctuation mark on the history of video art so far.”

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Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Today-Sept. 27. $10, adults; $8, students; free, children younger than 12. (949) 759-1122, www.ocma.net

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The H BOX’s chosen visionaries

Four new works were commissioned for the

H BOX in 2009, and they will have their world premieres at the OCMA show. The artists are:

Matthew Buckingham

The 46-year-old New York-based artist has had 76 public exhibitions and 16 solo shows over the years. “He makes films that are almost documentary-like,” says Benjamin Weil, artistic director of the H BOX. His new work, “We Knew About the Cave,” focuses on the finding of the Chauvet cave paintings -- mankind’s earliest known drawings that may date back as far as 32,000 years -- in southern France in 1940, but then hidden away and kept secret from the German occupation. Buckingham’s work, using accumulated images and self-made drawings, relates these events in a fashion that reminds Weil of visual detective work.

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Cliff Evans

At 32, Evans specializes in taking found elements off the Internet and blending still and moving images and animation. A quick and stunning introduction to his work can be found on YouTube by searching “Mount Weather.” “He creates eerie, mesmerizing collages,” says Weil. Evans’ “Citizen: The Wolf and Nanny” is an animated piece showing how a constant flow of images changes our comprehension of the world.

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Kota Ezawa

Based in San Francisco and Berlin, the 39-year-old Ezawa specializes in cel animation and bases his drawn work on famous media moments. A few years ago he produced a noted piece tied to the O.J. Simpson verdict. His 3-D animated work for H BOX is based on the first national broadcast of the Beatles and Rolling Stones on British TV, which he blurs together into a cacophony. Weil notes that “he puts two songs from the concert together, creating a sort of single band, with nine players, in a compelling mix.”

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Cao Fei

The 31-year-old native of Guangzhou, China, has been living part of her life as China Tracy, her avatar, on Second Life. Here, she uses Machinima, a gamer technology from the early days of online gaming, to record sessions in virtual life. This new piece focuses on her buying a piece of virtual property in which she creates a drifting, dystopian world that taps into “stark imagery of a futuristic place, that may remind some of the future shown in films like ‘Brazil’ and ‘Blade Runner,’ ” says Weil.

-- C.S.