A lot of today’s street artists grew up with video games around and they have a romantic nostalgia for the 8-bit characters of the “early” age of joysticks and chords and 2-color screens. For example Matt Siren bases his ghost-girl on his formative years with Pac Man.

Reaching back to that same nostalgic simplicity, the street artist Invader references the 1978 Atari video game that featured Space Invaders.  The pointillism of his countryman Seurat a hundred years earlier was updated by Invader when he began putting mosaics up in the streets of Paris in the late 1990s. The irony lies in the unique choice of medium – the tile; as old as fire urns, at once mass-produced and hand-hewn, makes up the “bit”.

This month Invader will be showing his new work, and his choice of medium is again unusual, but not out of character.  The Rubik’s Cube was a mind-stumping 3-d mechanical puzzle invented in 1974 that became a “hot” toy for kids around the same time as the Space Invader video game.  You can see pretty quickly why this toy is a turn-on to an artist like Invader.  In the video below, Invader pays homage to famous covers of vinyl album, a technology that has since been digitized too.