ASCENDING PERFORMANCE is a performance in the form of a smartphone app, which was distributed via MiKandi, an adult app store for Android phones. By making a very slow swipe gesture over the image on the smartphone screen, the user plays through the frames of the film one by one.
Fast movement doesn’t work. Through repetitious performance of this – quasi masturbatory – gesture, an erection gradually emerges. The work reshapes commonplace gestural interactions and experiences of mediated intimacy in mobile technologies, as well as engage with the blurring between the artistic and pornographic in digital content.

The app launch was accompanied by advertisements for the work in Artforum International and on pornhub.com.
The app features a digitized Super 8 film of the artist’s naked body.