For the Paris Olympics, it could almost be a new sport: Score points by hunting down mosaics that a mystery artist who calls himself “Invader” has cemented to walls across France’s capital, the world and even had carried aloft to the International Space Station.
Vincent Giraud, one of the artist’s Parisian fans, is already an avid player. He downloaded Invader’s addictive Flash Invaders mobile-phone game that awards points to users who find and photograph the colorful and quirky pieces of pixelated art.
Quickly hooked, Giraud has in just a year already tracked down 1,565 of them, accumulating so many points that he has rocketed into the leaderboard’s top 1,000, out of more than 360,000 players.
Photo: AP
“In a few months I found and flashed all those in Paris,” says Giraud, game-name Vince-Vader. Hunting for Invader mosaics, looking up and around for them on walls, pavements, bridges and even atop the Eiffel Tower, is “another way of discovering the city.”
Put simply: When Olympic visitors flock in their millions to Paris for the July 26 to Aug. 11 Games, they’ll be crowding onto the turf of France’s most international, invasive and intriguing contemporary street artist. It will be one invasion coming face-to-face with another.
Like Banksy, the British street artist he is sometimes likened to, Invader is elusive, fiercely protective of his anonymity and operating on the margins of illegality. He comes, glues and disappears into the night, leaving behind his signature pixelated mosaics made mostly with small ceramic and glass tiles.
Most resemble the aliens from the Space Invaders arcade game. Others are wonderfully elaborate, such as still lives of fruit or, in New York, portraits of Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. Some reference pop culture — Spiderman, Star Wars, Bugs Bunny, Ninja Turtles, pizza and the like. Some hint at deep research, including a portrait of guitarist Django Reinhardt facing the house where he lived, south of Paris in Samois-sur-Seine.
Since the first cataloged mosaic of a blue Space Invader went up on a Paris street in 1998, numbered PA_01, Invader has colonized the world. There are now more than 4,000 of his mosaics in cities and towns on all continents except Antartica.
London, Tokyo, Los Angeles and other cities were invaded in 1999; New York, Geneva and more in 2000; Hong Kong in 2001; Berlin, Bangkok, Melbourne. On and on.
The 4,000th mosaic was glued to a brick wall in Potosi, 4,000 meters up in the Bolivian Andes, in 2021. The European Space Agency installed Invader’s Space2 mosaic aboard the International Space Station in 2015.
“‘Anytime, Anywhere’ is the philosophy,” he says on his website.
In Paris — by far his most invaded location — the artist’s footprint is larger than ever as the Olympics loom.
A new exhibition in a disused multi-story building has one of his pixelations painted on its roof, visible via satellite on Google Maps. With a telescope, the show’s visitors can also peer across the grey roofs of Paris to Invader’s latest milestone: his 1,500th mosaic in the Olympic host city and its suburbs.
PA_1500 was unveiled last month on an exterior chimney of the Pompidou Center, Paris’ foremost contemporary art museum. Unlike for the bulk of his works which he installs guerrilla-style without asking, Invader sought and got the museum’s permission to cement the red-and-white Space Invader -type alien into place overlooking the city.
“It’s a symbol. It’s number 1,500. It’s Paris,” said Alexandre Aumis, the iconic building’s security director. “It’s got to be here.”
Aumis is a new convert to “Flash Invaders.”
“I run a lot in Paris, so I see them everywhere,” he said.
Some of those who know Invader say they’re expecting him to spring more surprises for the Olympics, perhaps installing new Games-themed mosaics.
“The invasion is the 15 million people who are going to arrive in Paris for the Olympic Games. It’s a lot. Obviously, there will be Invader fans among them,” said Fabrice Bousteau, the editor of Beaux Arts Magazine who curated Invader’s latest exhibition. “So there will be this meeting between two cultures.”
“He will doubtless invade the Games in a different way. I am almost certain.”
That’s thrilling for “Flash Invaders” players.
Niasha Chassain has tracked down just over 50 of the mosaics in Paris and says her children love the hunt.
“It’s a big celebration when we find one,” she said. “It forces you to look up in the street, to look around a bit, to think about turning around, to look in places that are perhaps not so attractive and discover that there are still things to see.”
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
RSS