Wellness Skull Is a Sauna of Death

Lisa Katayama — Tue, 06 May 2008 08:40:00 PDT

From the same guys that created the SlaveCity dystopia comes a cool alternative to the warmly lit, lavender-scented spa of the present—a giant skull with separate compartments for all your relaxation needs. The Wellness Skull houses a bath in its neck, a sauna in the head, and hot steam spouts at the eye sockets. There's no pretentious receptionist or wind-chime music to help you chill out—stepping into the skull will instantly take away the worries of contemporary society and fill you with thoughts of life, death, and the emptiness of our physical selves. It's like an instant dose of existential meditation. Atelier van Lieshout main page

A Perfectly Modern Holocaust-Like Dystopia

Lisa Katayama — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:40:00 PDT

An art studio called Atelier Van Lieshout has spent the last three years developing the perfect dystopia, called SlaveCity. SlaveCity is a place where every human right we've collectively worked toward achieving is turned on its head. But it's also the world's first zero energy town—because they recycle everything from cardboard to useless people. Pictured here is the Welcoming Center. Here, every single entrant to SlaveCity is screened via a taste test, and those who don't pass are stored in these massive vats. Check out a schematic showing how it works below.

Here you can see a schematic for the Welcoming Center. Sick, old people who taste bad are recycled in the biogas digester. Healthy but stupid people are recycled in the meat processing factory. The young and healthy go to the organ transplant center, and the smart and healthy go to work at the Call Center.

Currently, there are 200,000 inhabitants in SlaveCity, and there are separate universities for men and women. This one is the Female Slave University. It's kind of like a modern-day labor camp, where women are taught how to make themselves useful; the professors, who sit in the meeting room on top and get paid a lot of money while they watch the women work their butts off. The University houses 1,896 female students.

Those working in the Call Center are fortunate enough to have toilets.

The entire exhibit—blueprints, drawings, sculptures, and installations of SlaveCity, are on display at the Folkwang Museum in Germany until July 6th.

Atelier Van Lieshout via Designboom

io9: atelier van lieshout

Wellness Skull Is a Sauna of Death

A Perfectly Modern Holocaust-Like Dystopia