Les envahisseurs de l’espace

Dean Putney went to France found evidence of the coming invasion.

1. [Anonymous]

   Technically, the title should read “Les envahisseurs de l’espace”.
   In french, we differenciate “L’espace”, which is space, outside the Earth; and “d’espace”, undefined, which means the space between two objects.
   Sorry if it’s nitpicking

2. [cyklo]

   Does anyone know the reasons behind these mosaics? I’ve also seen them in Geneva and Manchester.

3. [theboredom]

   http://www.space-invaders.com/

   I believe the artist is Parisian.
   I saw a ton of these when I was in Paris last year.

   And while we’re on the subject of awesome French street artists I give you my personal favorite, Monsieur Chat!

   http://www.flickr.com/groups/mrchat/

   This whimsical little guy is all over Paris, usually in out of the way places way up high. I was constantly on the look out for new M.Chats.

4. [dculberson]

   Reasons? Almost certainly there are no reasons.. just people having fun.

5. [Nixar]

   WARNING

   The mustardhamsters.com site has redirected me to a malware site. It’s taken me to http : // uniqtds2.com / tds_u.php ? dname=mustardhamsters.com , which then redirected me to a site doing a “verification” of my Windows, which is apparently vulnerable, and that is weird considering I’m running Fedora 10. It then gets really obnoxious, with infinite JavaScript alerts.

   This very strange, considering I have adblock+ up.

6. [frogmarch]

   The artist is indeed a Parisian who goes by “Invader”, and he’s put these up in cities all over France and the rest of Europe. There’s one on a bridge a few blocks from my house in Lyon.

   http://www.space-invaders.com/

   For his installation in Montpellier, he arranged it such that when the locations of the mosaics are plotted on a city map, they form yet another, giant invader eating the city.

7. [qousqous]

   Found one of these on a small street in Avignon back in summer 2005, right next to a pretty great stencil. First thing of its kind that I had seen, and I thought it was pretty amazing. Only a few months later, I saw one on the side of a SkyTrain (our metro) station in Vancouver. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be the first sign of a full-on invasion: I haven’t seen any others since.

8. [dculberson]

   Nixar, I had no problems going to mustardhamsters.com. Perhaps you have an issue with your router or another machine on your network that has been compromised?

9. [Rob Beschizza]

   Dean’s not chaotic evil, as far as I know — perhaps just a bad Google ad?

10. [dculberson]

    Nixar, I had no problems going to mustardhamsters.com. Perhaps you have an issue with your router or another machine on your network that has been compromised?

11. [Nixar]

    DCulberson,
    I’m connecting through an SSH-forwarded socks proxy to a server I administer. The network is not the problem. Also my PC is running Fedora 10 with SELinux up and enforcing. I don’t control the local DNS but I’ve made sure it’s been upgraded to withstand injections.
    The only thing that could be dodgy in my setup are the many FF extensions I have installed, I’m reviewing them, but I seriously doubt it’s the problem.

12. [Cpt. Tim]

    i took this one near the london eye

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/captaintim/2511783921/

13. [Dean]

    Well! I may be chaotic, but certainly not chaotic evil. Chaotic neutral maybe…

    I knew that my WordPress installation had been compromised, but it had only ever amounted to some injected words affecting Google searches until now. I believe I have removed the virus that was causing the redirect, but I was unable to reproduce your results. Please let me know if it persists.

    That’s really cool that there are lots of the Invaders around. I’m hoping to use it as a clue in a video game I’m making for the iPhone. Maybe I can use the other ones to make a larger puzzle…

14. [pmh]

    Much like many taggers, the artist in question doesn’t seem to have a problem with placing his stuff on private property nor what it costs to remove it. In his mind, his esthetic judgement trumps everyone else’s apparently.

    I live in Paris. The Art-Deco building a friend lives in was “blessed” with the honor of being adorned with one of these. The co-owners would like the money back they had to spend to have the stone it was fixed to replaced. Failing that, they would appreciate the artist’s home address so that they could gift him with an equally inventive work of art, like a brick wall sealing him in.

15. [gornzilla]

    I saw them when I was in Varanasi, India and Kathmandu, Nepal last year. They just make sense in India.

16. [frenchienick]

    PMH-
    Taggers and other artists are part of what makes a city like Paris great. Sure most of the stuff up isn’t that good, but the good ones like Invader and others make the bad ones tolerable. I own a business in Paris that is a frequent target of taggers, and I spend a lot of time cleaning crappy tags off my walls, but I really like finding cool ones that I keep up. I would hate to live in a city where there was no street art.