On public facades across 40 cities worldwide, the French street artist Invader has cemented hundreds of ceramic-tile mosaics of Space Invader game characters. His latest project makes binary code from the tiles.
The clean corners of square tiles speak to Invader’s love of precise planning and perfectionist aesthetic. His public installations are strategically positioned, photographed and mapped, their locations at times even coordinated into the shape of another Space Invader. In his Rubikcubism project, he arranges the colored squares of the notorious puzzle into larger works of art, displacing any notion that merely solving the Rubik’s cube puzzle is a superlative demonstration of genius. His latest project involves black and white tile mosaics to create a QR code that, when photographed using an iPhone equipped with exclusive Imatrix (aka Bee Tag) software, translates into a message.
Like most urban artists, Invader’s work makes a playful point of taking ownership of the spaces and walls that belong to the viewing public, of subverting the sterile tendencies of urban structures and emphasizing the community of experience that makes being in a city so pleasurable in the first place.
The team at Jetsetgraffiti.com, a fantastic website featuring some of the world’s best street artists, interviewed Invader about his work.
Julie Greicius
