Julijonas had a vision of killing people with his Roller Coaster. “Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetic roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being...
The first plunge of 500 meters helps you build enough kinetic energy to propel you through the sequence of loops. To do so would exert 10Gs of force on your body, pushing all the blood to your lower extremities and out of your brain. This sensation is known to produce a feeling of euphoria, which would carry its rider into a gentle, eternal sleep by the ride’s end.
Where today’s methods for assisted suicide are “medicalized” and “sterilized,” Urbonas says “the ritual is brought back to the contemporary description of death” with his “alternative euthanasia machine.”
The project has drawn enormous attention from the public and received extensive coverage from international media. The feedback ranged from special TV shows, dedicated songs, a film script, a series of virtual replications, a project for school science fair, a tattoo to knee-jerk online comments and thorough expert discussions... The project was awarded the Public Prize of New Technological Art of Update 2013, Ghent, Belgium.
Julijonas Urbonas is an artist, designer, researcher, engineer, writer, Vice-Rector for Art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Vilnius, and PhD student in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art, London.
Model (scale 1:500):
Euthanasia Coaster
Application:
Euthanasia, execution
Dimensions:
Height: 510 m
Drop lenght: 500 m
Track length: 7544 m
Duration:
Lift: 120 s
Drop: 10 s
Exposure to 10 g: 60 s
Total: 3:20
Features:
Max speed: 100m/s
Inversions: 7
Max g-force: 10 g
Cause of death:
Cerebral hypoxia, lack of oxygen supply to the brain.