Smallist

There’s a Thai miniature festival in Phuket this week. The miniatures depict traditional Thai life:

The light and sound exhibition highlights villagers’ lifestyles, Thai culture, and especially a Traditional Thai Temple Carnival and also a Buddhist Parade, while some of the cute tiny things that attracted lots of attention were a miniature parade of Jatukam Ramatape amulets that have become a hot topic among Thais at the moment, as well as the displays of the smallest crystal elephants in Thailand, even inside miniature bottles, which most visitors have to see through magnifying glasses.

More at minithai.com, if you can read it.

Mmm looks like a fancy dessert!

The Olmecs had these little creepy homonculi statues. Now anthropologists are arguing that they might be representations of fetuses.

In addition to their naturalistic features and proportions, several of the figures possess specific details of anatomy found in fetuses. One feature that may be portrayed is cutaneous pellucidity. Between 15-25 weeks, veins can be seen beneath the skin. One sculpture under study is fashioned from a light greenish-gray albitite which seems to have a waxy, or translucent, surface or skin. On the top of the head and down the back are finely incised lines that appear to suggest this stage of visibility of the veins beneath the fetus’s skin.

Some wingnut pro-lifer should make a movie about these people. Oh wait…

Via Neatorama.

From birdwatching to trainspotting, Britons do fuddy-duddy hobbies incredibly well. The UK 1:6th Collector’s club is a remarkable example of that tradition. This German train scene is really stunning. But unlike the History Channel, they don’t just do World War II. Here’s a recent post of Joan of Arc.

Via Trendhunter.

Micrography is, obviously, “small writing”, and it has a long history. You can imagine the necessity of efficient use of space when stationery was composed of goatskin or clay, but the reasons for writing tiny changed with the centuries, from novelty to espionage to circumvention of religious law.

Then there’s the German writer Robert Walser, who wrote in a tiny “microscript“of his own devising.

Via BoingBoing.

Ilya Abelsky makes tiny Faberge-style eggs, about an inch or smaller. Some are inspired by Fabergé designs, others are a bit more kitchy.

You can see the original Fabergé eggs here. And yes, the Coronation Egg was featured in Octopussy.

The Boston Public Library has a new show: Miniature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treasures. Depicted, “Little Flower Garden”, weighing in at 13×9mm, and thought to be the smallest book in the world until 1900. Some are actually printed with movable type, using a 2-point font in the case of 1898’s Galileo a Madama Cristina de Lorena. Others are handmade. You can see more pictures at the Boston Globe.

Or, you can buy the newly published companion book at Amazon.

The smallest piece of flat art in the world? That’s what ARmark is claiming of this little guy. He’s 1/8th the width of a strand of hair. The technique is called “nanoentonography,” and the press release claims it was invented by “artist J’Sha”. Googling, however, suggests that J. Sha is in fact a nanotechnology scientist. Making this the smallest piece of outsider art, I suppose.

Sure, you can build scale models with a bazillion legos, like this penguin and fish. It’s basically a giant lego bitmap in 3d; a diagonal becomes a jagged series of square bricks.

But Chris Deck has a different vision for lego miniatures: He makes ‘em small:

Just more proof that constraints can make art better. Chris pretty much sticks to Star Wars, (I especially like his Cloud City) but there are other “microscale” Lego artists.

This is all via MetaFilter.

Via Apartment Therapy, a recommendation of this book, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. It’s the story of Frances Glessner Lee, a crime scene investigator who recreated crime scenes in a dollhouse to teach detectives the art of observation. An SF Chronicle story on Lee and the book here. And another, older article with pics here.