[15][16] In April 2014, Sulkowicz had filed a Title IX complaint with 23 other students, alleging Columbia has mishandled sexual assault cases.

[13] Journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis described this as "the most effective, organized anti-rape movement since the late ’70s.”[17][18] In April 2015, Nungesser filed a Title IX gender discrimination lawsuit against Columbia, its board of trustees, its president Lee Bollinger, and Sulkowicz's supervising art professor Jon Kessler, alleging that they had facilitated gender-based harassment by allowing the art project to proceed.

[9] Federal District Court Judge Gregory H. Woods dismissed the lawsuit[19] but allowed Nungesser to refile an amended suit.

[21] Their initial endurance performance piece consisted of Sulkowicz carrying a mattress wherever they went on campus during their final year as an undergraduate at Columbia University.

[28] The university cleared the student of responsibility,[29] and the district attorney's office declined to pursue criminal charges, citing lack of reasonable suspicion.

Sulkowicz's first effort was a video of themself dismantling a bed, accompanied by the audio of them filing the police report, which they had recorded on a cellphone.

[13]The 50-pound (23 kg), dark-blue, extra-long twin mattress used in the performance art piece is of the kind Columbia places in its dorms, similar to the one on which they say they were raped.

[33] Sulkowicz's final thesis show, the week before graduation in May 2015, included depictions of a naked man with an obscenity and a couple having sex, printed onto a New York Times article about the student they accused.

[25] The title of the piece is a reference to the caption in René Magritte's The Treachery of Images: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe".

[38] Sulkowicz wrote that the work, which examines the nature of sexual consent, was not a reenactment of the alleged rape and later stated that it was a separate piece from Mattress Performance.

A few examples of questions Emmatron had answers to included "Tell me about the night you were assaulted", "Is this art piece a part of Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)?"

[43] In the piece, Sulkowicz (in high heels and bikini with the “Whitney” logo, to convey the look of a woman in a beauty pageant) is tied up, berated, and hung from the ceiling on a wooden beam by a man in a suit, “Master Avery”,[43][44] as the figurehead of a ship.

Sulkowicz wore black lingerie, with home-made pasties made of tape, and covered their body with drawn-on asterisks.

Among the people quoted in the article was Jock Reynolds, the then-director of the Yale University Art Gallery, who said, "Pablo Picasso was one of the worst offenders of the 20th century in terms of his history with women.

"[52] The piece consists of a series of glass orbs that symbolize trauma, suspended by ropes, containing floating artifacts of personal significance to Sulkowicz and members of their community.