I 'Relaxed' for Three Minutes in a Makeshift Vacuum Chamber

Astronauts preparing for a mission spend months training in vacuum chambers and zero gravity simulators to get acclimated to the alien physics of outer space. Yesterday, artist Lucy McRae convinced me to try doing the same using an emergency blanket and a vacuum cleaner. I don't know if I'm now ready to sail to Mars, but the experience was eerily calming.

McRae's assistants asked me to remove my shoes and everything I had in my pockets, and I lay on a pallet enveloped in a silvery membrane. At regular intervals, a suction pump siphoned the air off from under the blanket, leaving me in the vacuum.

The membrane stuck to me like a shiny jellyfish and my skin warmed up. I felt like a prisoner, since all my movements had become difficult and sluggish, but I didn't care too much as I was inundated by a sense of relaxation.

Tactile sensations were at their minimum; my breath had turned lethargic. In front of me, behind a screen covered with the same blankets, another assistant was trying to dance in the vacuum, resembling a quicksilver bubble. The whole thing lasted three minutes. It was pacifying, but creepy as hell.

When it finished, I was quite glad that I hadn't chosen a career as an astronaut.

The installation, called Prep Your Body For Space, was created as part of London Design Week. McRae, its creator, is an Australian artist with a passion for belly dancing who calls herself a "body architect." Blond, slender, and somehow elfin-looking, she has long been interested in exploring how technology might transform the human body in a drastic way.

Her oeuvre features works as varied as an electronic tattoo that the bearer can interact with like a touch screen, to a "swallowable parfum"—a pill that makes your body produce an aroma after swallowing.

McRae is most recently interested in how the body behaves in the absence of gravity. The idea for this installation struck her while she was travelling on the bus. "I randomly met a person working at NASA and he told me that one of the biggest concerns that NASA has today is how a human foetus would develop in a zero gravity environment," she said. "If we don't figure it out, we won't be able to procreate while exploring the universe. So I set out to find some sort of solution."

She got in touch with some scientists who studied how the body reacts in the vacuum, and she started doing trials with a vacuum cleaner and a plastic membrane to replicate the outer-space environment that astronauts, pregnant or not, would have to deal with.

"While tinkering with the vacuum cleaner and the second skins, I realised that being in the vacuum was a really calming experience," she said. "I didn't know the science underpinning that, but my contacts at NASA told me that astronauts do a very similar thing with 'intermittent negative pressure therapy.' It's used to remove lactic acid from the muscles, and to stimulate blood flow when in space."

Feeling enthused, Lucy decided to use her makeshift vacuum therapy to make her audience feel like they were in a "relaxing nightmare."

"I want to put them out of their comfort zone, make them experience things they have never experienced before. In this case, I'm giving them a sort of weightlessness experience," she said. The dancer behind the shimmering screen adds an extra phantasmal tinge to the whole performance.

After I tried the vacuum blanket, it made a whole lot of sense to me that the project was first developed thinking about foetuses: it's easy to draw a parallel between the vacuum-induced placid stupor I felt and the muffled pre-life in the womb.

And McRae hasn't yet abandoned the foetus challenge; it's actually "the overarching theme behind all the research I'm doing in this period."

Her next step may have something to do with growing babies outside of their mothers' bodies. "I am looking at the possibility of ectogenesis, namely the technique of using synthetic wombs," she said. "The fun thing about it is that, in artificial wombs, a baby would take years to develop. And the more a foetus stays in the womb, the more intelligent it comes out of it. In other words, we may wind up creating a sort of super-baby. It's very cool."