The Remote Glove

Two boys stand in waist-high grass, and the one in the blue jacket is wearing a control glove wired to a boxy orange backpack with a little antenna. Follow his raised hand out across the field and you find what he is operating: a tall orange and white walking machine, facing a police van parked on the track behind it. Whether the kids are helping, interfering, or simply showing off is left entirely open. The grass, the pine treeline, and the washed-out summer light could be any Swedish field on an ordinary afternoon.

Simon Stålenhag is a Swedish artist who built his reputation on exactly this combination: the flat farmland and birch forests around Lake Mälaren where he grew up, with strange machinery dropped into them as though it had always been there. His digital paintings owe a lot to older Nordic landscape painting, where the weather and the horizon matter as much as the subject, and he treats his robots with the same matter-of-fact attention he gives the weeds in the foreground. The work made him internationally known through the books Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood, and The Electric State, all later adapted for screen. The appeal here is small and specific: a child holding a piece of serious technology the way another kid might hold a remote control car, while the adults deal with whatever has actually gone wrong out in the field.