he United States is a curio cabinet of quirky museums. Among them are the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum in Wisconsin, the Children's Garbage Museum in Stratford, Conn., and the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston.

But there's a gap. Despite the pride that Americans take in our technological prowess, this country — unlike Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan — does not yet have a major institution devoted to Internet-based art works and other forms of computer art.

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Of course it's more than likely that a digital-arts center will eventually open. "Museums usually get started not just because there is a list of things that should happen, but because an individual with a particular passion makes it happen," said Marc Pachter, director of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. "So it's an accident that it hasn't started yet, but I think there will be one. It certainly makes sense that such a place would exist."

Efforts to establish a one-stop shop for the digital arts — a Linkin' Center, if you will — have been, at best, modestly successful. Donors are tight fisted, especially when there are no tangible objects that they can call their own. As a result, while there are small high-tech art centers scattered around the country and virtual museums sprinkled across the Web, none fulfill the museum functions of organizing, commissioning, exhibiting, collecting, preserving art works and education.

But two organizations are moving in the right direction. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs are working on a Center for Arts and Invention, to be housed in a new $120 million building on M.I.T.'s Cambridge campus that could open as early as 2005. Meanwhile Eyebeam, an independent high-tech arts center in New York City, was to announce today that the innovative digital-arts curator Benjamin Weil will take on the top curatorial role there on Nov. 1.

Officials at both institutions said their centers would be modeled less on a traditional museum than on the Bauhaus, the 20th-century German school that encouraged artists to integrate science into their creations. Officials also cautioned that their plans were in their early stages and that money to realize them has not been secured.

At M.I.T. the 197,000-square-foot center would be in a sleek seven-story structure designed by the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. It is to contain two rooftop theaters and an atrium for media-art exhibitions. The I. M. Pei-designed Media Labs building next door will be renovated, with the addition of an exhibition space and an experimental theater.

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the Media Labs, said the Center for Arts and Invention represented a new direction for his institution, which had urged its professors and students to think like artists in cultivating new technologies. "Today we are looking at the arts more in terms of learning and expression," he said. "We see ourselves as inventing the future, creating the bandwagons of tomorrow."

A big gulp. We shall see how it works soon. The center will begin accepting graduate students in September 2003, before the new building is done. Officials said they were discussing partnerships with two local groups that are developing their own high-tech homes: the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Constellation Performing Arts and Film Center in Cambridge.

Eyebeam plans to build a $90 million building in Chelsea and has hired the architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio to design it. John S. Johnson, Eyebeam's executive director, said he wanted to create "a new kind of institution that's part think tank, that's heavily involved in art production and that also happens to exhibit work." The building could be completed by 2006.

With the hiring of Mr. Weil, 39, it has also gained some needed curatorial expertise. The co-founder of äda'web, one of the first sites devoted to online-only art, Mr. Weil has been the curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he will continue to consult. His plans for Eyebeam include commissioning new works, using its Internet site as an exhibition gallery and compiling an archive of digital pieces. ("Beta Launch," an exhibition of works by Eyebeam artists in residence, can be seen through Dec. 1 in its gallery at 540 West 21st Street.)