A history of Latin American literature could be compiled following that genre alone: the classic example is Jorge Luis Borges's A Universal History of Infamy, based on real characters and inspired by Marcel Schwob's Imaginary Lives, in turn suggested by Aubrey's almost imaginary Brief Lives.
"Inspired by the pictorial-scientific imaginary that underlies the study of tornados, hurricanes, and storms, and by the sheer pull of their simple and powerful forms, we attempted to test the tender as material language, using it to construct a full-scale wooden tornado," Normal describes on their website.
All were inspired by the "Codex Seraphinianus," the imaginary encyclopedia written and drawn in the 1970's by the Italian artist and architect Luigi Serafini.
Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, he asked himself if it would be possible to create a modern bestiary that was populated not by fabled animals, but by real ones.
Mr. Flumiani, a wisp of a thing whose Louis Vuitton wallet is sticking out of his pants, goes on, and on, about being disowned by his parents before starting a collection inspired by the adventures of an imaginary cad named Finnigan Nash Sinclair, when all he really had to say was "preppy".
You can see his masterpiece, an assemblage titled "More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid," at the Whitney Museum; a show at Hauser and Wirth presents his last major work, a cavernous installation of glowing imaginary cities, inspired by Superman mythology, and a hard-to-watch video of a sadomasochistic playlet.
The Winnowing Oar was a sculpture, made of oak, spruce and ash, of an imaginary tool inspired by The Odyssey (in the poem, Tiresias instructs Odysseus to take an oar from his ship and to walk until he finds a "land that knows nothing of the sea", where the oar will be mistaken for a "winnowing fan").
"Tangentially inspired by Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, and assembled like a cabinet of curiosities, journalist Caspar Henderson's first book highlights what nonhuman species reveal about being human.
"The motifs I use depict spaces without geographic reference chronicles of imaginary lands inspired by topography, ancient cartography, Asian estamp and landscape painting," Chophel writes on her website.
The post asked fans to dream up names for an imaginary scent inspired by "the smell of a box of Pizza Hut pizza being opened". But the fan response to the idea was so enthusiastic that Grip and Pizza Hut decided to make the perfume a reality.
