Hot Horse: Experimental Furniture as Infrastructural Medium

Katie Kim
→BFA FD 2028

ABSTRACT

Furniture is one of the first places culture touches the body. Infrastructural design disciplines and shapes bodily behavior, with furniture functioning

as a mediating system that encodes norms and materializes identity through physical constraints. The Horse was constructed as an experimental apparatus to act as an active agent in shaping experience, desire, and identity. In a pilot trial, the apparatus produced immediate shifts in

balance, reliance, bodily awareness, and self-

perception, demonstrating how designed systems operate through embodied constraint and make infrastructural power legible at the scale of the body.

INTRODUCTION

The built environment operates as a cultural system that normalizes behavior and organizes everyday life. Furniture in particular functions as discreet training devices for select cultural norms, yet its physiological and behavioral effects are rarely made explicit. This project

aims to explore those extremes by targeting bodily restriction, exposure, and fetish, using a temporary body-modifying tool and experimental system called The Horse.

The central research questions guiding this work are: How do designed environments impose bodily dependency and agency? How do external structures temporarily function as anatomy? In what ways can infrastructure condition identity through enforced posture and bodily exposure?

The Horse

The Horse is a custom-made apparatus designed to position the user (the “sitter”) into a solicitous shape with the solicitous signal of a wagging tail. It is intended to require dependency, temporarily replace anatomical function, and assign identity onto the sitter.

Open Horse Protocol

A supplementary guide was created to make the experiment reproducible, providing instructions for construction, positioning, and use.

METHOD

The Horse transitions from an idle state (periodic tail twitching) to an active state (full-range tail wagging) through a motion sensor located at the head of the apparatus, triggered when the sitter mounts The Horse and reaches the intended posture. Control is distributed between the sitter who initiates the interaction and The Horse which converts posture into tail motion.

The identities of the sitter, observers, and site were left unspecified. The Horse positions both sitter and audience as roles rather than individuals, allowing identity to emerge through interaction with the structure.

One sitter used The Horse under two simple conditions:

Ten minutes, alone
Ten minutes, in a semi-public space

OBSERVATIONS

Self-Observations (sitter):

Agency is immediately constrained; even the slightest shift causes wobble.
Normal anatomical functions are limited.
Enforced positioning created a sense of exposure and vulnerability.
Wagging tail directed attention without the sitter’s control.
Performing actions outside of normal bodily behavior generates feelings of dissonance; prolonged use begins to integrate these actions into normalcy.

Observations from outside observers:

You use this for sex?
Are you a furry?

CONCLUSION

The sitter does not transform into a horse but becomes a performer whose body and behavior are shaped by The Horse. Even short-term interaction alters posture, attention, and bodily reliance, suggesting that repeated exposure may reinforce these effects. The apparatus biases how bodies move, relax, and perform, and users may internalize behavioral patterns that persist beyond the interaction, demonstrating infrastructure’s capacity to normalize behavior and mediate identity.

This pilot does not attempt to resolve how sitter identity, audience composition, or site-specific context modulate these effects. Rather, it establishes the apparatus as an experimental system capable of making bodily dependency, exposure, and performativity observable. Future iterations could extend duration, introduce multiple sitters, or vary audiences and locations to investigate how designed environments influence posture, behavior, and social dynamics. Together, these findings raise questions at the intersection of biological, cultural, and systemic determinism, emphasizing the role of design in shaping embodied experience.

Katie Kim is learning how to juggle.