Animal Collective's forthcoming installation at the Guggenheim comes from a proud tradition of pop mash-ups with the art world

It's better than copying Jackson Pollock and more ambitious than pretending to be full-time robots. The only surprising thing about Animal Collective taking over New York's Guggenheim museum is that nobody thought of it sooner. But the Brooklyn experimental pop crew are collaborating with video artist Danny Perez on a site-specific installation for the museum's 50th anniversary.

The idea is to "transform the rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment". From the sounds of it, the piece – Transverse Temporal Gyrus – could beef up the band's future live shows considerably. Ticket-holders are promised video projections and visual abstractions; I'd count on at least a couple of ethereal black-and-white film shorts and Cy Twombly-ish swiggles projected on the walls. The band won't be performing in the space, but the three-hour show will include recorded music composed for the event.

The Guggenheim's curators have pulled off a neat trick. Of all the Brooklyn-based bands experimenting with art rock, this lot are the best choice to fill the space. Just imagine their bass bouncing through Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic space, their blissed-out rave-pop sliding down the spiral walls.

Animal Collective are not the first to try the art-pop mash-up, though. Plenty of bands have played live shows in galleries or museums. Blur's comeback started with a gig at the railway museum in Colchester. Pet Shop Boys have also played in several modern art institutions. And seeing the Strokes perform among 50ft dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum in 2006 is probably one of the most surreal gigs I've been to.

However, artistic intervention in a public institution, mixing musicianship with modern art, is a little less common. There's the Velvet Underground getting it on with Andy Warhol, and Kevin Shields curating and soundtracking an exhibition of Patti Smith's polaroids. Similarly, Massive Attack's 3D and UnitedVisualArtists worked on Volume at the V&A, another site-specific piece. The former built the sounds, synchronised to fit a luminous installation of columns in the foyer of the building in 2005. The audio-visual sculpture could only be triggered by visitors moving inside and around the piece, like a Dan Flavin show crossed with Kraftwerk.

Last year, David Byrne of Talking Heads brought his museum piece, Playing the Building, to London's Roundhouse. Originally staged in Stockholm's Färgfabriken gallery, Byrne's interactive installation was a sublime bit of mechanical doodling. Visitors were invited to the show to play an organ connected by trailing tubes and wiring to the walls, girders and beams of the building. Bizarre, but properly seductive. As I'm sure Animal Collective will be.

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Animal Collective's forthcoming installation at the Guggenheim comes from a proud tradition of pop mash-ups with the art world

It's better than copying Jackson Pollock and more ambitious than pretending to be full-time robots. The only surprising thing about Animal Collective taking over New York's Guggenheim museum is that nobody thought of it sooner. But the Brooklyn experimental pop crew are collaborating with video artist Danny Perez on a site-specific installation for the museum's 50th anniversary.

The idea is to "transform the rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment". From the sounds of it, the piece – Transverse Temporal Gyrus – could beef up the band's future live shows considerably. Ticket-holders are promised video projections and visual abstractions; I'd count on at least a couple of ethereal black-and-white film shorts and Cy Twombly-ish swiggles projected on the walls. The band won't be performing in the space, but the three-hour show will include recorded music composed for the event.

The Guggenheim's curators have pulled off a neat trick. Of all the Brooklyn-based bands experimenting with art rock, this lot are the best choice to fill the space. Just imagine their bass bouncing through Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic space, their blissed-out rave-pop sliding down the spiral walls.

Animal Collective are not the first to try the art-pop mash-up, though. Plenty of bands have played live shows in galleries or museums. Blur's comeback started with a gig at the railway museum in Colchester. Pet Shop Boys have also played in several modern art institutions. And seeing the Strokes perform among 50ft dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum in 2006 is probably one of the most surreal gigs I've been to.

However, artistic intervention in a public institution, mixing musicianship with modern art, is a little less common. There's the Velvet Underground getting it on with Andy Warhol, and Kevin Shields curating and soundtracking an exhibition of Patti Smith's polaroids. Similarly, Massive Attack's 3D and UnitedVisualArtists worked on Volume at the V&A, another site-specific piece. The former built the sounds, synchronised to fit a luminous installation of columns in the foyer of the building in 2005. The audio-visual sculpture could only be triggered by visitors moving inside and around the piece, like a Dan Flavin show crossed with Kraftwerk.

Last year, David Byrne of Talking Heads brought his museum piece, Playing the Building, to London's Roundhouse. Originally staged in Stockholm's Färgfabriken gallery, Byrne's interactive installation was a sublime bit of mechanical doodling. Visitors were invited to the show to play an organ connected by trailing tubes and wiring to the walls, girders and beams of the building. Bizarre, but properly seductive. As I'm sure Animal Collective will be.

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