On 19 November 2014 the Whitney Museum of American Art held its final Gala and Studio Party in Marcel Breuer's building at 945 Madison Avenue, after nearly five decades there and ahead of its move to the Renzo Piano building in the Meatpacking District. For that evening the museum commissioned artist Will Pappenheimer to make Proxy, 5-WM2A, an augmented reality work presented as a "virtual designer drug" for guests to consume on their own devices.
The work ran inside the Layar augmented reality browser, which guests were asked to download to a smartphone or tablet in advance of the event. Once in the galleries they located and scanned QR codes to launch the layer, and the Breuer interior appeared through the camera view overlaid with hallucinatory virtual elements: fields of green discs and red specks, colour tunnels, drifting figures, a swimming fish, and a slowly rotating 3D model of the Breuer Building itself.
Pappenheimer framed the piece as a "dissociative class" drug for the institution, intended to help the Whitney community detach from the Breuer building and transition to the new site. The museum catalogued the work for its artport online-art portal under accession AP.2014.1, with the credit line "Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its artport website", and described it as the last artwork commissioned for the Breuer building. The gala itself was presented by Louis Vuitton and raised more than $4.3 million; the museum reopened downtown on 1 May 2015.
