Invader's New Binary Code Street Art and a Bridge Too Cool

French artist Invader is the Banksy of the videogame aesthetic. Since the late 1990s, he has used ceramic subway tiles as tangible pixels in his game sprite-inspired street art. Though his street work is most clearly influenced by Taito's Space Invaders, he has also put up works that reference Q*Bert and other early arcade games.

Landing in more than 30 countries in the last decade, Invader has attached his mosaics to sidewalks, overpasses, shop fronts, street corners, and even the Hollywood sign. He describes his artistic assaults on urban landscapes in videogame terms, as "missions." In Montpelier, the locations of Invader's physical graffiti can be plotted on the city's map, forming the shape of a space invader character. He's done a slew of indoor work as well, including a series of mosaics made by twisting Rubik's cubes into pixel blocks that he assembles into portraits, from the Mona Lisa to Jack Nicholson (the latter cleverly titled "Rubik's Kubrik").  He's also created a line of retro tennis shoes bearing a cool iconic sprite on the side, but the best part is the sole. Raised tread forms a rubber Invader mosaic that you can color and then stomp around town, leaving your own game graffiti behind.

One of Invader's largest and best pieces is a rare public commission he just finished for Quartier21/MQ in Austria. Using several tons of black, blue and white tiles, the artist covered a footbridge that lets onto the Museums Quarter in Vienna. The result is a vibrant corridor of videogame art set into the old city like a welcome invasion.

This week, Daniel Yahoda at JetSetGraffiti has posted a two-part video interview with the enigmatic Frenchman, who conceals his identity behind a welder's mask. The first in the series (posted below) focuses on his latest fusion of low and high tech. For this project, Invader has reduced his tile-based palette to the on/off options of black and white, producing what he calls Binary Code street art.

The works, which have a very abstract feel to them, do double duty as QR codes. Invented by the Japanese company Denso in the mid-1990s, QR codes are a kind of 2D barcode. By viewing his binary street art through a cellphone running a scanner app, such as iDecode for the iPhone, users can recover the message behind the art, literally.