In Pornotopia, Paul B. Preciado describes the Playboy universe as the blueprint for a new kind of male habitat. The so called Bachelor Pad is more than a piece of furniture: it functions simultaneously as a workplace, media center, and technological prosthesis—an apparatus that produces a new type of masculinity. Autonomy, consumption, technological control, and sexual availability become part of a spatially and media-organized habitus.

Hefner’s Dream takes up this iconic design object, hangs it on the wall and removes its occupant. Butter-yellow and glossy, oscillating between postwar modernism, Space Age aesthetics, and consumer electronics, the bed initially appears as a false promise of comfort, and sovereign self-determination. With every rotation, the blanket is set in motion, and remains to an unsettling sleep.

The bed is transformed from an instrument of masculine self-staging into an autonomous machine. The body for which it was designed is absent; yet the model of life and the notions of masculinity materialized within it continue to exert their influence.