Category: Fantasy

Type 700 Tom

February 20, 2023 By arne hendriks Off

The Thumbling project focuses on global variants of the Tom Thumb and Thumbelina tale. There are literally hundreds of variants of this popular story that features a character of extremely tiny size. This character may be referred to as thumbling, inchling, fingerling, dwarf, homunculus, manikin,…

World in a Gourd

February 2, 2023 By arne hendriks Off

Pumpkins, for one reason or another, are able to ignite our imagination. Just think of Cinderella and how in this fairytale a pumpkin turns into a coach and back into a pumpkin again. Perhaps its relative largeness within the vegetable kingdom enables the telling of…

Japanese Miniatures: The 1/8th Project

July 5, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

Our series on Japanese Miniatures investigates the specific Japanese small scale sensitivity as expressed through a love for things like bonsai, sushi, netsuke, and capsule hotels. Perhaps Japan ‘knows’ things about smallness that may help us embrace the desire for less. The 1/8th Project is an episode…

Lancelot’s Pony

January 22, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

The importance of the horse for social, cultural, and economic life in the Middle Ages made them a research focus for both historians and archaeologists. A recent paper in the International Journal of osteoarcheology presents a dataset of English horse bones from 171 unique archaeological…

Vertical Empathy

February 16, 2021 By arne hendriks Off

He who shrank is a 1936 sci-fi story by Henry Hasse, originally published in Amazing Stories Quarterly. It is about a man who is forever shrinking through worlds nested within a universe with apparently endless levels of scale. Written long before moon travel and our current…

Rod at Dawn

March 2, 2020 By arne hendriks Off

In 1994 popstar Rod Stewart gave a concert on Copacabana beach in Rio di Janeiro. And it turned out to be a legendary concert as it attracted the largest crowd of people in history for a musical event. 4 to 5 million people came to…

Guangzhou Reversal Room

December 30, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

The Incredible Shrinking Man was invited by the Guangzhou Triennial 2018, curated by Angelique Spaninks, Zhang Ga and Philip Ziegler, to resurrect one of its favourite shrink experiences: the Ames room. An Ames room allows people to visually experience a shift in body size by…

Abundance Fantasies: Body Inflation

June 3, 2016 By arne hendriks 0

Body inflation is the practice of inflating or pretending to inflate a part of one’s body. It is commonly done by inserting balloons underneath clothes and then inflating them. Some people have specially made inflatable suits made from latex rubber to make themselves bigger all over. Others explore this fantasy through animation,…

Japanese Miniatures: Okamura Fossil Laboratory

February 24, 2016 By arne hendriks 0

We can only speculate on what inspired the Japanese palaeontologist Chonosuke Okamura to develop his exceptional Fossil Laboratory. Perhaps he felt that the rather unglamorous study of tiny fossil of algae and vertebrates from the Ordovician period limited his imagination. Or maybe this is a…

Shrink Film Archive

May 6, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

From the surreal explorations of Pedro Almodóvar in Hable con Elle to the blockbuster entertainment of films like Honey I shrunk the kids, shrinking is and always has been a popular topic for filmmakers. Here’s a list of shrink films. Click the title for previews…