

Back in 2008, the blog Who Cares About That? wrote about Vanessa Mancini's project to build a functional sculpture: a bathtub made from deconstructed books fitted together and then sealed so that one could "bathe in knowledge." It's a beautiful artifact, though I can't find any evidence that it was ever finished. If you know more about this piece, please post in the comments.

This bath is made entirely out of books which Vanessa cut and fitted together over a metal frame to form a bath of books, which is suspended by four antique bath tub, lion-shaped feet. She intends to later cover it in layers of resin and has already applied proper taps and drain, so that it will be a utilizable, functional bath at all effects.

The idea is of immersing oneself in knowledge, books, truths, and 'cleaning' or 'purifying' one's mind with from external, every day life bombarding from media, by reading ad reflecting on books,- 'pure sources', which is of course, metaphorical, implying we can become polluted by ideas of truths and knowledge, which we can only 'clean' by reading our way through to our own ideas and reflections.