Toward a Critical Media Theory of the Hot Tub

Hot tubs don’t appear very often in critical media theory or histories of technology but they should. In 1975 in North America a hot tub would be a handmade, wood-fired, barrel-shaped cedar cauldron full of stoners where you could catch Legionnaire’s Disease and argue about the nature of the universe while coveting someone’s unwaxed life partner.

Though in a certain kind of North American carport you’re still likely to come across a mouldy tarpaulin-covered barrel tub or two, something started to happen to hot tubs in the years since 1977 when they were commercially released: As part of the nascent pool and spa industry, they began a transformative journey. At first we’d see cast acrylic shells with embedded seating and jets. Now these tubs have complex system presets, smart connectivity, apps, smart water-management systems, entertainment displays, vibro-acoustic massage features, custom LED chromotherapy programs, and atmospheric effects such as fog or mist, and their context window has expanded to include larger and more complex social spaces with bars, gazebos, towel racks, furniture, flora, and lattices.

When I started thinking about hot tubs in the context of technology, interface, and media environments a few years ago, I started making a series of ink and watercolour drawings, hoping to capture them as absurdity-tinged media-technical apparati whose symbolic function exceeds their utilitarian role.

Some of the originals

Because for all their otherworldly shapes, a hot tub is still a punchline: In a hot tub you are still likely to encounter stoners and be oriented to the existential sublime of the night sky and all the brain in a vat questions you can handle.

When I started playing around with generative AI I thought again of the drawings and wondered what might happen if I trained a custom Flux LoRa model using them as a dataset. I also worked with language through the lens of text-to-image outputs using ideas and approaches inspired by techno-spiritual traditions such as theosophy, specifically the work of Hilma AF Klint, the 19th Century Swedish painter who believed her paintings were received as transmissions from beyond the visible world, communicated through her body, and translated by her hand into image. This became The Spa at the End of Time.

I produced 21 images, which I’m releasing as a print edition with Monica Reyes Gallery, and then translated the images into 3D models to make an audiovisual work voiced in the style of a medium receiving visions from the astral plane. First I built the digital part as an interactive web app and now I’ve formatted it for presentation in an immersive 360 dome.

Spa at the End of Time 007, archival print on photographic paper, 24 x 24”, 2025. Contact Monica Reyes for more info.

Spa at the End of Time 006, archival print on photographic paper, 24 x 24”, 2025. Contact Monica Reyes for more info.

Spa at the End of Time 011, archival print on photographic paper, 24 x 24”, 2025. Contact Monica Reyes for more info.

In the project, giving form to the visions of the unnamed narrator leads to the idea that these shapes and formations are pre-figurations of a divine spa that awaits humanity in a speculative, post-embodied future.

I am interested in connections between the idea of spiritual transmissions from the astral plane and the contemporary moment where we can work with the non-human intelligence of AI.

Like guided transmissions, generative AI reveals images that arrive through unfamiliar, black boxed forms of labour that feel simultaneously authored and summoned.

If you are in Vancouver on February 19th 2026, come and see the work at the dome in the incomparable HR MacMillan Space Centre. (Tickets here, proceeds to the Space Centre). It feels right to show this work in a dome theatre, especially one that normally focuses on the collective wonder of the cosmos (an expansive mandate that includes Laser Floyd). It is an immersive, technological architecture designed to produce awe, just as cathedrals were.

This environment creates something like a guided cosmology delivered through contemporary tools of projection and made using synthetic vision, where the hot tub appears as an absurd yet strangely plausible symbol of where our leisure economies, our spiritual longings, and our machine intelligences may eventually converge.

Get your tickets for the Dome show and join us for the opening at Monica Reyes Gallery afterward! The print exhibition runs until March 14, 2026 (1100 Chestnut Street, Vancouver, BC).

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