There is a small, brightly-coloured mosaic on the entablature of a nondescript building in Paris’ 4th Arrondissement. It caught my eye when I visited the city in 2008, and I snapped a blurry, zoomed-in photo from the sidewalk on my digital camera. These colourful 8-bit creatures from Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Q*bert, and Super Mario World are the work of an artist known as “Invader.” Like many street artists who create guerrilla works (e.g. Banksy), Invader is anonymous: “I define myself as an UFA, an Unidentified Free Artist. I chose Invader as my pseudonym and I always appear behind a mask” (1). These small-scale mosaics of video game characters and 8-bit-style alien creatures (made with coloured ceramic tiles, cement, and glue) are his signature works, and they ‘invade’ public spaces and invite visitors on a sort of scavenger hunt through the city. The Invaders stand out against the uniform facades of Paris’ nineteenth-century buildings, medieval walls, grey stone bridges, and public monuments, but they still seem to integrate so seamlessly into the urban environment that they’re easy to miss (unless you’re looking).
Invader,PA_570. Ceramic tiles, cement, and glue. Rue de Fourcy and Rue François Miron, Paris.
In 2019 I took a photo of the Fontaine Saint-Michel in Paris’ 6th Arrondissement only to realize later that there was a small orange Pac Man ghost installed behind one of the bronze gryphons. Some Invaders also play on context and location to create visual puns and delight viewers. In PA_1324(a uniform name format that indicates the location and number of each mosaic), a blue Space Invader flanked by red wine and vegetables is tiled onto the building adjacent to the Fédération Française de l’Apéritif. In NY_111, a tiny Mario is installed beneath the mouth of a real-life pipe on the side of the street, as if he’s just been spat out of his digital world.
As these locations suggest, Space Invaders is an ongoing and geographically dispersed project. During the two weeks I spent in Paris in 2008 I spotted eight more mosaics — one the Left Bank of the Seine, directly across from Notre-Dame, one above a tailor on the Rue Geoffroy l'Angevin, and one above the Rambuteau Metro station, just down the street from the Pompidou Centre. Invader describes his work in rhizomatic terms: as they are installed, “each of these unique pieces become the fragment of a tentacular installation” (2). Like most street art, his mosaics are also impermanent in nature (although less so than spray paint). They are frequently created, destroyed, and reinstalled, which creates a living landscape of guerrilla artworks courtesy of collectors, fans, other street artists, the city of Paris, and Invader himself. The red Space Invader on the corner of the Rue de Fourcy and the Rue François Miron was removed shortly after I first photographed it in 2008, but by the time I returned to Paris in 2019 it had been “reactivated” in the same location with bright new tiles. Paris in particular is a dynamic site dotted with Invaders that continually appear and disappear — in total, there are 1,462 in the city (3).
Invader,AMS_22, 1999. Coloured tiles, glue, and cement. Amsterdam.
By installing these guerrilla mosaics, Invader subtly transforms the landscape of the city and affects how people experience this urban space. He writes: “this project, I hope, will leave a print not only on the streets but also on the minds” (4). The locations of his Invaders are carefully chosen for this purpose. The artist maintains a tension between invisible/visible, marginal/prominent, and official/guerrilla. “The characteristic of these places is that they are not the kind of places usually assigned to art and its public representation. Doorways, corners and crossroads, shop signs and street name plaques are thus the kinds of spots where Invader likes to operate” (5). Indeed, the bright colours and familiar iconography of the Invaders often draw pedestrians’ eyes toward the quoins, cornices, door jambs, and footings of buildings, and sometimes mimic actual signs or street addresses. They sometimes seem to appear in front of you like magic or catch the corner of your eye when you least expect it, changing your experience of the space ever so slightly. Invader writes: “I need to identify the neuralgic points of the cities I visit. It takes a lot of time as it is a long scouting process. I often compare it as urban acupuncture” (6).
Invader,PA_556, 2004. Coloured tiles, glue, and cement. Rue de l'Hôtel Colbert, Paris.
Invader’s practice reminds me of the Situationist International, a group of avant-garde artists, writers, and other creatives who operated in Paris during the mid-twentieth century. In 1957, founding member Guy Debord declared that “our only concern is real life; we care nothing about the permanence of art or anything else. Eternity is the grossest idea a person can conceive of in connection with his acts” (7). As he suggests, their work was experiential, experimental, and often fleeting. The SI created artworks in urban spaces, experimented with alternative artistic media and techniques, and sought to produce art that subverted both the art world andthe way people experienced urban space. Such transformation could be the result of détournement — “translated as diversion, rerouting, hijacking” (8) or “semiotic guerrilla warfare” where images and ideas were bricolaged together to create something new (9). Like many of the Parisian avant-gardes, Invader had fine art training (10) but chose to experiment with alternative materials and techniques. His public installations are also free of the constraints of a traditional gallery — they are fluid, unpredictable, accessible, and uniquely ‘playable’. As he asserts, it is “about liberating Art from its usual alienators that museums or institutions can be” (11).
Invader’s work produces a new kind of urban way-finding that guides people around the city from point to point in an alternative and playful way. He describes his mosaics as “the equivalent of a complement to signage” (12) that mark certain places not on any tourist map. PA_1151 literally imitates a Parisian street sign. However, Space Invaders is not a static artwork. Invader clearly understands his art as an action, but perhaps in the sense of a game rather than a performance: as he describes, “going into a city with tiles and cement and invading it is the most addictive game I have ever played” (13). The game is even suggested by the works themselves — one of the first Space Invaders I spotted in Paris read “I [invade] Paris,” a playful re-appropriation of the iconic “I ♡ NY” logo.
Invader, VRS_17. Coloured tiles, glue, and cement. Boulevard de la Reine, Versailles.
The gamification of public space and art isn’t necessarily a contemporary phenomenon. Rather, it has deep roots in earlier avant-garde art practices (many of which originated in nineteenth-century Paris) that activated participants within a site. The SI in particular sought to gamify space with their dérives — affective and playful journeys through urban space that created a live “psychogeographic” landscape. Debord wrote that “The situationist game is distinguished from the classic notion of games by its radical negation of the element of competition and of separation from everyday life. On the other hand, it is not distinct from a moral choice, since it implies taking a stand in favor of what will bring about the future reign of freedom and play” (14). Paul Ardenne writes about Invader:
“walkers will be able to rediscover the City of Light by going from one “space invader” to another, just as Baudelaire’s flâneur, that lover of unexpected spectacles, savoured the unexpected. This way of seeing the city allows us to explore it in the name of both art and curiosity while letting the spectacle and its surprises engage our eye and mind – letting them invade us” (15).
Of course, Invader’s game is much more “game-like” than the SI’s dérives. Like an arcade game, the number, type, and location of the Invaders adds up to a score in each city the artists visits: “I give a score of 10 to 100 for every new piece installed. Every city has therefore its own score which is the sum of all the Space Invaders created on its walls” (16). For example, PA_645scored him 20 points, while PA_646scored 30. Invader writes: “usually, I try to display 20 to 50 pieces per city, which is already a good score. Sometimes I happen to return several times in the same city, deploying different “invasion waves” as I like to call them. The goal is to increase my score by continuously and restlessly invading new spaces” (17).
Invader,ROM_20, 2010. Coloured tiles, glue, and cement. Viale Vaticano, Rome.
Not all Space Invader mosaics were actually created by Invader, as the artist points out (18). However, the rhizomatic and gamified nature of the work is conducive to multiple artists competing with one another, using Invader’s original scoring system to measure their success. I noticed a guerrilla mosaic this week in Toronto, a city that Invader has not (yet) Invaded.
The official Space Invaders app also turns the search for these mosaics into a game, mobilizing the public to find, photograph, and upload works. Players accumulate points with each genuine Invader and appear atop the app’s leaderboard just as if they’re playing a real video game. However, this game is embedded into both real anddigital space — one might compare it to Pokemon Go, a “game to be “played” in the real world, not on a screen” (19). Shoshana Zuboff goes on to write that “the idea is that players should be “going outside” for “adventures on foot” in the open spaces of cities, towns, and suburbs” (20). This hybrid real-virtual game reflects the intermediality of the Invaders themselves: Invader is using an ancient physical art form to re-make digital aesthetics in urban space. He writes: “I decided to give a material appearance to pixelization through ceramic tiles” (21). Indeed, the intermediality of this representation is made easy by the shared qualities of the medium — “As these creatures are made of pixels they are in some sorts ready-made for tile reproduction” (22).
Invader,Invasion of the Louvre Museum, 1998. Photo documentation of an action. Paris. Source.
It’s important to note that Space Invaders does not just exist outside — Invader’s creatures have also made their way into art institutions. Like Banksy in 2005 (23), Invader performed a guerrilla action where he installed his artworks in the Louvre: “On December 30th 1998, I invaded the Louvre Museum! With the help of a photographer, I installed ten space invaders and therefore became the only living artist exhibited at the Louvre…” (24). Following in the footsteps of French avant-gardes including Marcel Duchamp, who détourned canonical artworks by inserting puns and symbols, Invader also invades canonical artworks like The Scream with alien creatures(25) or re-makes paintings like Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque (26) and the Mona Lisa in his signature 8-bit style. Yet, Invader deliberately chooses to work anonymously both as a graffiti artist and in the art world, where his Invaders are sold by galleries and auction houses. He is both everywhere and nowhere. He writes: “I can visit my own exhibitions without any visitors knowing who I really am even if I stand a few steps away from them” (27). His anonymity likely also allows him to continue “Invading” urban space and now the art world, even under the bright lights of contemporary art galleries in New York, London, and Paris.
In 1936 Robsjohn-Gibbings recreated an ancient Greek mosaic for the floor of his Madison Avenue showroom. His iconic klismos chair, now reproduced by Sedaris, was faithfully modeled after examples from antiquity, such as found on a c400 BC stela (second photo).
