France is being attacked by alien beings! This summer in France I noticed characters from 80’s video games in the strangest of places. For instance, see this one, that I found while walking somewhere near the Latin Quarter in Paris.

And though I took a picture of just one, I noticed these pixilated, bit-mapped graphics (from some Space Invaders type of game) all over the place. I was intrigued but not enough to research it in any way.

Just a couple of days ago I was reminded of this when I saw some stickers of similar characters on Kristen Kereluik’s laptop and told her about the sightings in France. Well, she did the requisite Google search and sent me a few links. As it turns out these are the artistic creations of an artist named (no surprise here), Invader. As Invader’s wikipedia says:

Invader (born 1969) is a French street artist who pastes up characters from and inspired by the Space Invaders game, made up of small coloured square tiles that form a mosaic. He does this in cities across the world, then documents this as an “Invasion”, with maps of where to find each invader.

Kristen also found a Flickr site devoted to documenting this artwork.

How fun!