Invader, the Space Invader

Well, I was going to post about Invader today, so let me get the "what I did today" stuff out of the way first:

I slept in (I didn't need to be in until noon anyway), and then made my way to the Centre. There was a fair bit of petit dépannage (little repairs) so I spent a fair bit of my day taking care of that. And then a fair bit more chatting with a few people back in Chicago (thank you, iChat). Sometime soon, I also have to invest in Skype. Anyway, I got a recommendation from DJ for a decent shopping mall that wasn't in the middle of nowhere and creepy (see last week), so I hoofed it over to Place d'Italie for a bit of groceries and such. I hit up Darty, hoping to find a true US-Europe electrical converter. You see, I brought my clippers with me with the idea that I would cut my own hair (as I did in Chicago), and save myself a fair bit of money. But, of course, I forgot to buy a transformer in Chicago, where it would've been 1/2 the price, I'm sure. As it turns out, what I picked up at Darty was an adapter, but not an actual 110-220v transformer. It was too cheap to be true. After a bit of research on their site, it looks like I'll eventually have to give in and buy a 35€ transformer to make the clipper magic happen.

As for groceries, I went to the Champion that was in the building, only to discover that it was in the middle of renovations. It was still open, and I could still buy most of the stuff I needed, but the place was a mess, a maze, and a jungle of lineups. On the upside, though, I bought the fixings for a nice salad, which is promptly made and ate as soon as I got home. Mmmm. Fresh veggies.

So, after my revelation about the disconnect / guerrilla advertising between the cute space invader mosaics I've seen on the streets of Paris and the t-shirts I saw at the Parade, I did a bit more research on the person(s) behind the tile mosaics. At first, I only had this site to work from, which merely listed the cities that had been "invaded" and sold cute little maps of the invasion. I eventually tried the root domain of the URL and got this adorable flash animation and interactive site/store. It's a "A REALITY GAME BY > INVADER" ! Love it. Take a good moment to check out all of the links on this page, as there's a lot of info to be gleaned from it (and lots of pictures!).

This eventually led to a semi-official site for the Paris invasion, which includes images of most if not all of the Paris invaders, with addresses, sortable by arrondissement. A bit more googling led me to the web page for an art exhibit of Invader's work in L.A. at Sixspace, called Rubikubism. Apparently, he's been doing a bunch of installations using worked-out rubik's cubes, such as this:Pretty hot, no? It seems like he's also making mosaics with rubik's cubes now, as well:

But that's not all! There's also a great photostream/pool on flickr that includes pictures of Space Invaders all over the world. And, finally, a (silent) video from Invader's site that shows him on French TV, doing a very quick deployment of a small tiled invader right on the set. Oh, and here's a link to a "DIY tiled game character" post on Instructables, which is this amazing online DIY community; the guy pretty much reverse-engineers the Invader's process and then lays it out for you. Neat!