Category: Adventure

Okinawa Allowances

February 29, 2024 By arne hendriks Off

During a recent visit to the Japanese island of Okinawa in search of the secret of smaller we were lucky enough to end up at Marina’s Cafe. Not because the food was good (which it was), but because we met its owner Mariko, who explained…

The Swallow Cycle

October 2, 2023 By arne hendriks Off

Thumbling stories have two things in common: 1. The protagonist is by default very small, and 2. To emphasize and perhaps ridicule this smallness, at some point in the story, they’re swallowed by an animal, preferably a cow. The good news is that most times…

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,…

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…

Rafting Monkeys

June 7, 2020 By arne hendriks Off

We know of only three species of pre-historic mammals that managed to cross the Atlantic ocean between Africa and South-America. One of them was the now extinct Ucayalipithecus monkey about 35 million years ago. The other species of “immigrant” mammals were New World Monkeys, flat-nosed…

Original Final Words

July 18, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

Richard Matheson’s novel ‘The shrinking man’ was published in 1956 and soon adapted for film. In the film the famous last words are inspiring but quite different from the original final words in Matheson’s book. Supposedly the original text was adapted by director Jack Arnold.…

Females to Mars

October 28, 2014 By arne hendriks 1

Kate Greene took part in a NASA-funded research project called HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation). It required that she and five other crewmembers live as astronauts on the surface of Mars. For four months they were cooped up in a geodesic dome on…

Co-Ex Interface

September 27, 2014 By arne hendriks 0

When first confronted with the idea of a human species with an average height of 50cm, initially most people express their fear for cats and dogs and how our diminutive size might affect our relationship with them. The Incredible shrinking Man doesn’t deny that this…

Turtle Tears

December 16, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

Size strongly influences our ability to recognise and benefit from specific small scale possibilities that would be available if man was a lot smaller. The act of shrinking promotes the Feynmanian awareness that our large size keeps us from a much richer experience of reality, as well…

Towards Weightlessness

January 24, 2013 By arne hendriks 0

Seeing Jane Fonda’s clumsy striptease in the opening scene of the sci-fi classic Barbarella arouses laughter rather than anything else, but it does trigger a desire to break free from gravitational inhibitions. Weightlessness is defined by the absence of stress and strain resulting from externally applied…

This Crowded Earth

November 30, 2012 By arne hendriks 1

This Crowded Earth by Robert Bloch is a 1958 novel set in a future where overpopulation has inspired science to create a small human race with the use of hormone therapy. The story starts in the late 1990’s when suicide, crime and accidents have increased steeply…

Tiny House Movement

April 15, 2012 By arne hendriks 0

Fish kept in small tanks remain small because they produce pheromones that suppress growth. If the same rule applies to people, the small house movement may proof to be a powerful tool to curb our physical growth. The small house movement is an intriguing architectural and social movement…

The Rescale Archive

November 28, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

Rescaling something always has effect. It makes us notice things. It changes the way we perceive, and it reinstates a certain autonomy of the object. But what happens if the rescaled object is the human body? How would we perceive reality if everything around us…

Rewilding Ghost Suburbia

October 21, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

If mankind decides to shrink, and we succeed to achieve an average height of 50 centimeters as The Incredible Shrinking Man proposes, one of the most significant changes will be the increase of available space. The scale of buildings, infrastructure and distance will be enormous…

Downsized Flames

July 24, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

Our relationship with fire is one of the oldest and most fundamental relationships with the natural environment. Fire keeps us warm, cooks our food and melts our steel. We know how much heat comes from a gas lighter, how much wood we need to heat…

The Dactylian Five

June 24, 2011 By arne hendriks 0

Frenchman Florent Marrot participated in a series of 10 weekly explorations of shrinking mankind at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam. One of his rather curious responses to the idea of becoming smaller was to divide himself into five 50 cm small versions of himself, thus…

Snow Flakes & Weaver Birds

May 9, 2011 By arne hendriks 1

Scaling ourselves down has the promise of something truly magical. Not just the magic of becoming smaller but magical in the sense of real transformative knowledge. If small, we will be able to come closer to, or even enter, what is now often beyond our…

The Tiny Frontier

October 27, 2010 By arne hendriks 0

In a response to our ambition to create a 50 cm research doll, Australian designer Guy Keulemans points out that “the idea of a 50cm puppet exploring tiny urban space is interesting, simply because we are running out of regular sized spaces to explore. The great age…