43

In 2020, a digital copy of the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien was acquired by the Art Collection of the City of Vienna (MUSA - Sammlung der Stadt Wien). Accompanying a wireless server that casts a signal of the Palais is an email written by Tom Lonner that was engraved onto a brass plaque.

As the site of the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien at Löwengasse still bears no memorial to the story of the building and the people it hosted, this plaque marks the ambiguous integration of the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien into an institutionalized version of history. Like the device stored in the collection, it allows the story to move freely between physical locations: an art storage facility, a street corner in the 3rd district of Vienna, a city in the province of Prussia, an island just off the coast of Seattle.