ASCENDING PERFORMANCE is a performance in the form of a smartphone app, which is available from MiKandi, an adult app store for Android phones. 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 my naked body. 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. Through repetitious performance of this – quasi masturbatory – gesture, an erection gradually emerges.