The Breathtaking Horror of 'The Electric State'

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Not all nightmares are so easy to wake up from. An exploration of Simon Stålenhag’s brilliant worldbuilding artbook ‘The Electric State.’
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The Electric State is a beautiful nightmare. I don’t know how else to describe it.

I could say it’s an artbook by the brilliant artist Simon Stålenhag that explores an alternate version of the United States in the late 90s. This is true. I could say it’s a story where a young woman and a small robot venture across a ruined landscape littered with the skeletons of terrifying machines. This is also true. I could say it’s a poignant warning of how runaway consumerism can have apocalyptic consequences. This, I believe, is true as well.

Yet none of these descriptions tells the whole. So, for this entry into the archive, I’ll dive deep into this masterpiece of sci-fi worldbuilding. Now, let’s enter the world of The Electric State.

0:00 Enter The Electric State
1:10 A Girl and Her Robot
3:40 The Decay of that Colossal Wreck
5:28 Commercializing a Nightmare
8:45 Monsters in the Mist
12:13 The Dark Network
14:43 Drone Sweet Drone
16:33 Ends of the Earth
18:53 Support The Electric State

Copyright Disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. All video/image content is edited under fair use rights for reasons of commentary.

I do not own the images, music, or footage used in this video. All rights and credit goes to the original owners.

♫ Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio:
Mysterious Green Fluid, Sanity Unravels, Haddonfield Horror, Alone in the Dark, Dusk, The Witch, The Vanishing, Tenebrae, The Guardian

Beauty Flow
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

#CuriousArchive #TheElectricState #Worldbuilding
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I was just looking into this book because of this video when I found out Netflix is making a movie about it. I sincerely hope it delivers even half of the world that this incredible book displays!

idavid
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Simon Stålenhag has been my favourite artist for ages. His work really is a masterpiece

SYD._o
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The sense of melancholy that Simon Stalenhag can convey simply through art is truly baffling

thatkidmamboGaming
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The concept of people losing themselves in addictive virtual realities is older than many may realize. The first work of fiction to explore this idea was a series of short stories, later condensed into a novel, called "The Man Who Awoke" by Laurence Manning. It was published in 1933. A similar work, "Pygmalion's Spectacles", was written by Stanley G. Weinbaum in 1935.
This is certainly not to take away from Stålenhag's magnificent artwork and concepts. Quite the contrary, his work is breathtaking. I just mention it as a point of interest.

Markus_Andrew
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I'm mostly just grateful that Simon doesn't feel the need to explain or explore every single detail of the lore and backstory of the world he's created through his incredible art. So many game developers, writers, illustrators, and filmmakers leave nothing to the imagination when it comes to the worlds they create. But that sense of mystery and intrigue regarding the unknown is exactly what makes these worlds so captivating.

kentslocum
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What I really like is how the main villain, the Intracerebral Intelligence, is only spoken of like 4 times, nothing is known about it except that it exists and it's trying to create a physical body to manifest in the organic world.

No explanation as to why it does this, what it wants, what its end goal is. Just it's a thing that is there, and it's not going to leave

cinders
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As someone who spent their childhood living in the Mojave, I think it's the perfect setting for this. There's... nothing out there. Barely any towns, and what towns there are, it's as if they're just clinging to life. There's hundreds of square miles of nothing at all. I love this. In a terrible way, I'd love to explore this world

SlashForeward
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This is an artist with some incredible understandings of lighting, light transport, and how photography functions with these elements. I’m amazed by how accurate his lighting is. Even the dynamic range of his hypothetical camera that’s taking these images seems accurate.

itsdnk
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Oh my God, I just realized that 16:56 and 18:32 are a direct before and after of the same scene, probably only seconds apart given the man is still in the same position. It even shows the birds flying away just before the colossal machine wakes up followed by bits of debris falling off the monster after it stands up. That's how fast these things can come to life and move around, that is the most terrifying thing ever

georgemccartney
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Love how you mentioned Norco. Not enough people have played that absolutely magnificent piece of art.

BelelEscabel
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A lot of this reminds me of the imagery seen in Half-Life 2. Specifically the idea of old urban areas being overtaken by a sort of alien looking technology, wires, high tech doors built over tenement buildings, abnormal power sources, the awe and fear you get the first time you see the giant Striders (which are essentially huge robots themselves) Top tier stuff all around.

drewcifer
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This is probably by far my favorite piece of printed art in the last decade. Its very nuanced tale about our current obsession with interconnectivity and the very human things that might get lost with it are just topped by stålenhags iconic art. Every single artwork makes you stop and pulls you in. I have it standing visible in my bookshelf together with things from the flood. Thank you for covering this. It really can’t hurt if it gets a more wider public range. Let’s hope the upcoming TV-Series can draw some more people in. Again Thank you a lot. Great work👍

Coldwater-swme
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I found this book once in a library when I was too young to understand all of it, but even at the time, I felt that it was something absolutely amazing. I didn't get the book, and just read it in the corner. I left and went home, and I didn't think about it for so long that I completely forgot the details, and I had no idea what it was called, so I couldn't search for it either. I didn't even know how to describe it, and I was beginning to wonder if it was even real. Today I found this video, and it's amazing to see these things that I was starting to wonder if they were just a dream. Now, as somebody with more interest in storytelling, I truly realize how incredible this book is. As somebody raised in the early 2000s, these images have an almost GMod like feel to them.

orionbarnes
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If you noticed, even the abandoned cartoon type characters that were supposed to be happy and smiling, looked angry and evil.

ravenmeyer
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My wife bought me this book as an anniversary gift after she saw I had a couple wallpapers on my PC from it. What an incredible piece of art.

MasterShade
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Your videos are becoming increasingly artistic over time, your passion for the material really shines through. One note though- Raw Fury is the publishing company for Norco, but the developers were Geography Of Robots.

hillwench
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During the bit where the Neurocasters were compared to the internet, I momentarily felt like the internet was being judged too harshly because I would argue that it's a tool to be used and that we use it for our livelihoods, but now I wonder if the people in the Electric state similarly had to depend on the neurocasters in a similar fashion

doppy
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This story has horrified and enchanted me beyond any description of words. I absolutely love Stalenhag’s work here as well as “Tales from the loop” and he has quickly become the artist that inspires me the most.

quanzoboi
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As impressive as this art is…so is your ability to explain it, to put into words the *feeling* of it all. I wouldn’t have been able to explain how this art makes me feel, but you did. And you did it with such accurate poignancy that it blows me away as much as the art does. Thank you.

Lenape_Lady
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This really reminds me of the original Siren Head video. I know it seems kind of stupid because of how the internet obsessed over that video, but it really gives off the same feeling of nostalgic dread and of looming lifeless machinery. It shares the sense that whatever these things in the sky are have somehow gone unnoticed for so long despite their incredible size, and only now make their presence known.

greenberrygk