Simon Stålenhag is an artist and designer specialising in futuristic artwork focused on stereotypical Swedish countryside environments. As his work has evolved, Stålenhag has created a backstory for it, focused around a governmental underground facility. In parallel to the real life decline of the Swedish welfare state, large machines slowly fail, and the eventual result of this remains a mystery.

“The only difference in the world of my art and our world is that … ever since the early 20th century, attitudes and budgets were much more in favour of science and technology.”

In 2015, a Kickstarter campaign was launched to fund a tabletop role-playing game also called “Tales from the Loop”, based off the book of the same name; multiple media outlets compared it to TV series Stranger Things. Set in the 1980s and either the United States or Sweden, players roleplay as a group of teenagers dealing with the aftermath of the Loop. Different classes of characters are equivalent to steretypical childhood roles, for example, “Jock”, “Bookworm”, or “Computer Geek”.

More recently, Stålenhag has covered the western United States in a third artbook, The Electric State, which was also crowdfunded via Kickstarter. The book’s movie rights were sold to the Russo brothers in 2017, with It creator Andy Muschietti slated to be director. (source)

Artist Website > www.simonstalenhag.se

Tumblr > simonstalenhag.tumblr.com

Twitter > @simonstalenhag

Facebook > www.facebook.com/simonstalenhagofficial