What do you do when you’re bored of your job? Most people try to spice up their lives in the workplace. And for designer and artist Julijonas Urbonas, that means designing a roller coaster that’ll kill its passengers in the most euphoric way possible.
The Lithuania-based artist had designed the killer coaster with the goal of having people end their own lives with “euphoria and pleasure.”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eKmKLZOAT38
Source: YouTube, ThrillmasterMedia
The rollercoaster was designed back in 2010, when Urbonas was getting his PhD in the Royal College of Art in London. According to him, the coaster uses “extreme g-force” to kill people by hurling them down the 500 meter-monstrosity at 100 meters per-second (which is g-force 10). As if that wasn’t enough, it’s got 7 loop-de-loops on it.
“Your blood is rushed to your lower extremities so there is a lack of blood in your brain, so your brain starts to suffocate. When your brain starts to suffocate, people become euphoric,” he says.
Source: Postjung
“Usually pilots experience such extreme forces for just a few seconds, but riders in the rollercoaster experience it for one minute and nobody has experienced this for such a long time,” he adds while describing his design at the Dublin Science Gallery.
Fortunately though, brain experts say that death by this coaster is highly unlikely. “The likelihood of any pleasure and euphoria being produced is low; nausea and discomfort would be more probable,” wrote Dr Damasio on the Design and Violence blog message board, run by NY’s Museum of Modern Art, which also exhibited Urbonas’ design.
But Urbonas is still insistent in using his design to kill people. He said that it could help “control populations” while still letting them have one last thrill.
Source: Daily Mail UK
However, he also notes that the design was made as more of an artistic expression/project than anything. As someone who has been developing roller coasters “since childhood”, what he finds most amusing is seeing other people’s reactions to it.
“Some of them say that the death coaster changed the way they experience amusement rides, others claim they would never ride coasters again,” he writes in response to Dr Damasio’s critique.
He also said that the contraption could be used as a more “fun” way to euthanize people in countries where it’s legal, in contrast to other “boring” ways of euthanasia.
“It [euthanasia] is executed in an extremely boring fashion, proposing ‘humane’ voluntary death could be more meaningful, personal, ritualistic,” he writes in defense of design. Again though, he notes that he is not advocate assisted suicide in any way; it’s just an art project.
Source: Daily Mail UK
“The talk on pleasure could also extend to exhilarating sensations that lure millions coaster fans. In addition to these physiological pleasures, I want to stress, the death coaster hints at the possibility for a specific kind of semantic pleasure: an alternative ritualized death appealing to both the individual and the mourning public,” he writes.
“Of course, it is not for everybody, very much like thrill rides and horror movies.”
Don’t worry though, as with most crazy and deadly art projects, only a scaled-down model of the coaster has been built, and the actual rollercoaster won’t be made any time soon.
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