Image courtesy Ai Hasegawa and Joseph Popper
Japanese love hotels go out of their way to satisfy the most outlandish fetish: some rooms offer the feeling of being inside a subway carriage, a class room, or a Hello Kitty SM room, others locks you into an alien abduction nightmare (/dream).
Ai Hasegawa, second year student in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London, proposes to close loving couples into an even more extraordinary fantasy.
Her Extreme Environment Love Hotel simulates impossible places to go such as the Earth of three hundred million years ago (during the Carboniferous period), or the surface of Jupiter by manipulating invisible but ever-present environmental factors, for example atmospheric conditions and gravity.
Our bodies would survive if we were propelled back to the Carboniferous period but they would need to adapt if we’d stay over long periods of time. It is estimated that during that time, the peak oxygen content of the atmosphere was as high as 35%, compared to 21% today. This oxygen level resulted in insect and amphibian gigantism–creatures whose size is constrained by respiratory systems that are limited in their ability to diffuse oxygen. For example, the ancestor of the dragonfly, the Meganeura, grew up to seventy-five centimeters due to the huge concentration of oxygen in the air.
Life on Jupiter doesn’t sound very pleasant for us either. The atmospheric environment of the largest planet within the Solar System is one of strong gravity, high pressure, strong winds, and extremely cold temperatures.
How might our bodies change, struggle or even adapt with varying conditions around us?
Portable Carboniferous room. Image credit: Anthony Dunne
The first of Ai Hasegawa’s Extreme Environment Love Hotel room, the carboniferous one, is currently on view at the work in progress show of the Royal College of Art. The prototypes show how couples would have to carry a suitcase containing higher levels of oxygen that recreate the atmosphere of the Carboniferous period, they would also be surrounded by plants similar to the ones that proliferated in the warm and humid climate: large trees covered with bark and huge ferns growing in swamps.
The designer’s work is of course a bit eccentric but it also propose to reflect on how making love inside an Extreme Environments Love Hotel room might give rise to new evolutions and mutations of the human body and sex and give it a brand new role away from our biologically-programmed needs and inclinations.
Breathing mask for the portable Carboniferous room. Image credit: Anthony Dunne
Why did you decide to explore new frontiers in Love Hotels?
Love hotel is a utopia to serve the people’s dream and fantasy.
We are able to go to space or have a hyper gravity experience at NASA , but that is only for chosen people, the rich or some elites.
A love hotel, however, is opened to all adults. I could have worked on a ‘Fun fair/ amusement park’ type of attraction, but these gives us only short time experiences that don’t last more than 5 minutes.
I wanted to have an experience longer than a funfair ride, an experience that would last until our body could feel slight changes and adapt to them. You can stay at the hotel for one hour, for a week or a year. Also sex is a hard form of exercise, and a “love” hotel is the perfect place to challenge the limit of our body in extreme environmental conditions.
Also from critical point of view, Love hotel is designed for sexual urge. It is a place for desire and pleasure, probably not for love nor reproduction.
I feel sex isn’t motivated solely by life instinct, by the need to reproduce and make our species survive. Sexual urge can make us take some life-risking actions such as HIV infection.
I wonder if our DNA might need to be modified in order to redesign the strategy of reproduction… In other words, why not have some evolutions?
To trigger evolutions, we might want to use a technology to modify our DNA, of course. But before that, we need to study our body potentials with basic elements, invisible factors, such as atmosphere, gravity, temperature, electromagnetic waves, etc. We need new environments, new frontiers.
I chose places where ‘we are not able to go to’ for a romantic or melancholic reason. We don’t have any strong reason to go to Jupiter. Moreover, we are able to have a time-trip to the future (possible in theory, but it’s only a one-way trip), but not to the past (the theory hasn’t been proved yet, i think). The love hotel would be the ideal place to serve such dreams and fantasies.
Image courtesy Ai Hasegawa and Joseph Popper
What does their body risk if the lovers keeps the breathing mask for a long time?
There is no risk. If healthy people breath 100% oxygen for long time, they would have lungs problem, but this Carboniferous portable room portable supplies only 35% oxygen under usual atmospheric pressure. A real chamber, thus not the “portable” version will be higher atmosphere, but still it will be fine. This real chamber will be similar to Hyperbaric medicine. It would probably be slightly easier to breathe and recovering energy would be faster than usual in this room.
The 20G centrifuge at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California
You’re also working on a Jupiter room. What will it be like? And feel like?
I hope it will be like a NASA’s 20-G Centrifuge. But cheaper version would make it look more like a Rotor in fun fair. A wall become a floor by centrifugal force. Bed is on the wall.
3D sketch of the Jupiter room. Image courtesy Ai Hasegawa
Customer might need to wear a harness to support the weight, they might also need to wear a bone protector, just in case. You have to be careful with the position you chose. If you want to adopt a ‘woman on top’ position, then your body might be too heavy to climb up. Besides, the man’s hipbone might break under the weight. But if you stay for a week or a month, maybe after a while your body will adapt and become more masculine.
In a Hotel room, you also need to have a toilet and a shower. The water in the Jupiter room would fall 2.35 times faster than usual. One day lasts only 9 hours and 55 min in this room.
If you want, you might probably be able to make a baby under the hyper gravity…
Thanks Ai!
Check out The Extreme Environment Love Hotel: Carboniferous Room at the Student Work-in-Progress Show, Royal College of Art, London. The exhibition end on Monday afternoon.