Critical Review
Invasion Book 2.0, Paris is a ceramic artwork produced by the ground-breaking French street artist Invader. Coming in an edition size of 50, Invader has published a book with a mosaic tile cover kept in a plexiglass box. The cover is dominated by green tiles and is decorated with a menacing looking alien rendered using red tiles. The alien appears to be flying down the book cover and has white eyes which stare downwards at the targets it is shooting at. The alien on the book’s cover comes from the popular arcade game, Space Invaders, and the use of mosaic tiles resonates with the 8-bit visual register of arcade games.
Invasion Book 2.0, Paris was published as part of Invader’s ambitious installation project, the Space Invaders project, which the artist started in 1998. The project, which was inspired by Taito’s arcade game, involves Invader installing mosaics of aliens onto the walls of various cities all over the world.
Invasion Book 2.0, Paris provides detail of where the mosaics Invader installed during his second ‘invasion wave’ of Paris can be located and acts as a guide for avid lovers of Invader’s work to track down the original artworks. Invader has also created an online database, alongside a collection of books, to track all the artworks he has installed all over the world.
