The Incredible Shrinking Man

The Cell Cycle investigates the mechanisms and substances that regulate cell division and growth. The process of deciding to divide, or not, is a highly regulated interplay of messages and receptors reporting on the state of the environment and the state of the cell. While contemporary conditions have prompted most animal species to initiate an […]

In the Low Countries the Calimero Complex refers to people, organisations or countries that feel they’re under-appreciated because of their small size. The name given to the complex refers to the lead character Calimero in an Italian animated cartoon series featured in the early 70’s on Dutch and Belgian public tv. Calimero is a small […]

What does it mean when your spelling control keeps changing the word degrowth into the word regrowth? How obsessed with growth must a society be when decades after the word degrowth was introduced to inspire a paradigm shift towards the destructive idea of continuous economic growth, our vocabulary still does not except it, and not […]

In trying to understand what makes the idea of continuous growth so powerful (despite clear evidence that it is a harmful concept) The Incredible Shrinking Man turned to cancer research to learn where healthy growth turns malignant. Although cancer is a very complex phenomenon the seminal paper “ The hallmarks of cancer” managed to simplify […]

It may seem farfetched and even a little awkward to discuss a frog’s preferred sexual position as part of a strategy to shrink. However, to change humanity’s irrational desire for bigger towards a much wiser desire for smaller we must invest as much in alternative fantasies and imaginative storytelling as in the instantly practical. In […]

Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, a 2006 report released by the Food and Agriculture Organisation, assesses the impact of the livestock sector on environmental challenges, along with potential technical and policy approaches to mitigation. The livestock sector poses serious challenges to the environment at every scale from local to global. According to senior U.N. Food […]

In trying to understand what makes the idea of continuous growth so powerful (despite clear evidence that it is a harmful concept) The Incredible Shrinking Man turned to cancer research to learn where healthy growth turns malignant. Although cancer is a very complex phenomenon the seminal paper “ The hallmarks of cancer” managed to simplify […]

Buster Keaton was a master of visual comedy in the era of the silent movie. His use of props and perspective often brilliantly deflates presumptions on how things are supposed to be. In the opening scene of The High Sign (1921) the simple gesture of unfolding a newspaper turns into a beautiful shrink/growth exercise; in many […]

The zebrafish is one of The Incredible Shrinking Man’s most beloved spirit animals. Being a model organism for endocrinological and genetic research positions it between fact and fiction, the known and the unknown and the present and the future. Thus it invites us into realms of reality yet undiscovered. As mirrors of the human body they became […]

Several years ago Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout suggested that rather than reduce human height to 50cm (as The Incredible Shrinking Man has investigated) people should shrink to the size of a parasite and live in the stomach of  a cow. It’s an interesting suggestion, not only because it opens up perspectives on collective use […]