How much "female pleasure" is there in porno? Non-mainstream productions celebrate female and queer desire as a self-determined practice. The right to make one's own body visible and monetize it also applies to pornography. In the legal, regulated market, female performers earn more—contrary to the typical gender pay gap. Yet with Al-generated deepfakes, the profit balance is shifting in favor of the major platforms: bodies are coded, fantasies are automated, and digital desire is cannibalized.

Anja Lekavski and Rosanna Marie Pondorf take these developments as their starting point. They let Al write a story after Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden (1973)—one of the first studies of women's sexual fantasies. Individual fragments are woven into a theater piece with three actors, whose portraits are generated from their own images. The files unfold across water-green tapestries, stretched over a modular wall frame, such as those typically seen at trade fairs.In between, scenes from the play appear on marble tables, which are framed by screenshots taken from the pornos most frequently consumed by women. The fact that hentai has been one of the most popular genres on Pornhub for years becomes material for female fantasy and commodified lust in Phantom Vibration.

The work's title refers to the digital symptom of feeling a cellphone vibration without receiving a message. When applied to desire, this sensation becomes an image of the simulation of arousal: a phantom with no real origin that nevertheless feels bodily tangible.

We move through a network of fabric and stone, between softness and hardness, intimacy and monumentality. Sensuality meets sexualization. From this charged interplay, Phantom Vibration explores how female desire is narrated between self-empowerment and exploitation-as a hidden fantasy, self-care routine, consumable surface, or a coded projection.

[text] Mareike Schwarz