© Kai Vierstra

The Feline Fugu Urban Defense Laboratory (F.F.U.D.L. Fort) was a sculpture I built in my studio window. The window overlooked a one-way street, a little quieter than the main road viewed from the other corner of my studio. It was designed and placed with the positioning habits of my cat Onslo in mind. He likes to sit in the window on top of his scratching log which, at the time, overlooked my neighbors backyard (now it looks over a much busier one-way street nine stories up). The fort's immediate defenses, an inflating latex skin on it's exterior, mimicked those of the puffer fish, or "fugu". So it occupied this feline comfort zone and used the fugu "puffing" to posture that it was bigger and badder than it actually was.