4000 : The Complete Guide to the Space Invaders – 1998-2021

4000 : The Complete Guide to the Space Invaders – 1998-2021 –

“When I put up my first space invader in an alley in the suburbs of Paris, I would never had imagined that that single act would take me so far. I have often called it a happy accident because I did not come from the graffiti world and had never practiced the art of mosaics. I was more interested in the early days of microcomputers and the images they generated in which their elementary particles – pixels – could be seen. As a child, I had also played the very first video games on consoles that we plugged into our big Cathode Ray Tube televisions, like Pong or those cult cartridge based Atari 2600 consoles. What fascinates me the most today is the way things have changed since then: not only my mosaics […] but also the world that surrounds them.

In my first photos-taken with a film camera!-you can see, for example, telephone booths on street corners of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center between which; in February 2000, I had placed NY_09 [538]. On the other hand, there are no smartphones in the hands of passers-bys, no electric scooters, no anti-Covid masks or other artifacts that have appeared in the last twenty-five years and that are omnipresent today.

As each mosaic is different, I quickly devised a system to save and classify them so as not to lose track of these sometimes short-lived works. Halfway between a stamp album and the Pokemon Cards Guide, this book is a record of my first 4,000 mosaics scattered around the world. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed compiling it.

The adventure continues. Look out, the space invaders are out there among you…” – Invader 08/2022