Category: Scaling

Exponential Stairs

April 15, 2024 By arne hendriks Off

The Exponential Staircase (2013) was an artistic research project by students of the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, as part of a 3 day Shrinking Man masterclass that investigated the experience of becoming smaller. The daily topics evolved around the themes of food,…

Overgrowth

October 3, 2023 By arne hendriks Off

“Overgrowth“ is a large video projection of a bonsai tree by the British artist Ceal Floyer. The Incredible Shrinking Man first encountered the work during the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 where it was presented at the end of a long corridor. As such it…

3 x 3.75 Mollys

November 17, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

Will a desire for small eventually help us overcome our obsession with continuous growth or is it just another way to continue a feeling of control and abundance? This paradox is the heart of The Incredible Shrinking Man as we state that it is better…

Japanese Miniatures: Bonkei

January 4, 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. A bonkei is a miniature landscape…

Suez-Maxed Out

March 30, 2021 By arne hendriks Off

At 07:40  on 23 March 2021, one of the largest containerships in the world, the Ever Given (400m x 59m x 21m) , was passing through the Suez Canal. After losing the ability to steer because of high winds the ship became stuck and blocked…

Shaq Sequence

May 4, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

Shaquille O’Neal is an American retired professional basketball player. At 2.16 m tall and 147 kg, he was one of the heaviest players ever to play in the NBA. His size inspired the Shaq Sequence, an number of images used by The Incredible Shrinking Man to illustrate the ramifications…

Kleiber’s Law

September 10, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

Large animals have slower metabolisms than small ones. A mouse must eat about 35% of its body mass every day not to starve whereas a human can survive on only 2%. The relationship follows a power law: basal metabolic rate (R) is proportional to the…

Savage Scale Models

November 16, 2014 By arne hendriks 0

In his structuralist anthropological study The Savage Mind Claude Lévi-Strauss writes: ” To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts. Reduction in scale reverses this situation…in the case of scale models, in contrast to what happens when…

Helium Speech

May 24, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

People with growth anomaly, like Jyoti, often have very high pitched voices. It’s a tone of voice that takes some getting used to. And we might have to if we decide to shrink ourselves. In a rather humorous clip from a German TV show we…

Preformationism & the Homunculus

October 21, 2010 By arne hendriks 1

In 1694 Nicolaas Hartsoeker, in his Essai de Dioptrique produced an image of a tiny human form curled up inside a sperm cell, He referred to it as petit l’infant, the small infant. This image, depicting what historians now refer to as the homunculus, has become iconic of the…

The Shrinking Iguana

September 20, 2010 By arne hendriks 4

Much to his surprise, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University has found that in times of famine, marine iguanas in the Galápagos Islands shrink in length and then regrow when food is plentiful again. “For vertebrates, it’s sort of a dogma that they don’t shrink,”…