Tate puts visitors in a spin with 30mph twister slides

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The Bankside gallery has been turned into a large playground with visitors able to travel down five large slides which spiral through the huge space connecting the galleries with Turbine Hall. The biggest slide is 55.5 metres long and has a drop of 27 metres.

The helter skelter, entitled Test Site, is the brainchild of German installation artist Carsten Höller who sees slides as an essential mode of human transport.

He wants to see slides connecting MPs with their offices and the House of Commons chamber and between shopping centres and Tube stations.

Visitors will be able to sit in canvas sacks and slide from the fifth floor to the ground, accelerating to 30mph. Three chutes depart from each of the main levels.

The slides of stainless steel and polycarbonate acrylic glass will stay until next April and are the latest in the Unilever series of Turbine Hall installations.

Höller said: "Going down can be like being under the influence of a drug, a thrilling experience, but it is also a fast and efficient way of getting from A to B. It's a playground for the body and the brain. It's art and it's not art."

A spokesman for Tate said that Höller viewed slides as a way of directly improving people's state of mind and livelihoods.

He said: "The installation is an experiment into the reception of slides by the public and the effect they have. Höller's proposition is that slides could and perhaps should be incorporated into existing architecture and future buildings ... because the frequent act of sliding could bring about untold changes in our everyday behaviour and outlook."

Höller made a giant slide at the headquarters of fashion company Prada connecting its boss Miuccia Prada's personal office to her car.

Perhaps predictably Charles Thomson, Stuckist artist and longstanding critic of the Tate, criticised the slide: "Slides are not art. All (Tate director) Sir Nicholas Serota needs to do is to get rid of the few bits of art the Tate does possess. Then he could turn the whole of Tate Modern into a theme park."