10 Facts About Invader's Space

Space captures Invader’s fascination with outer space and utilises multiple mediums - including a waffle!

The artist saw his dreams turn into reality on August the 20th, 2012, when his SpaceOne mosaic, here depicted in one of the prints, took off thanks to a helium balloon equipped with a camera personally built by the artist, a project he named Art4Space.

As evidenced by the testimonial visual documentation provided by the camera, the ‘artisanal spacecraft’, in Invader’s words, managed to reach the stratosphere for a short time, before landing back on Earth, its status permanently altered as the first artwork to have ever been to - and returned from - space.

As stated by the artist, the act of sending his work to space returns the characters of the Taito video game to their own place of origin, outer space.

To celebrate and divulge his accomplishment, the artist also released a short 25 minutes-long film presented at several film festivals, most notably at FILAF in Perpignan and Lo Schermo dell’Arte in Florence, and screened all over the world, from Miami to Tokyo to New York, Paris, London and Brussels.

Having heard about his self-financed and designed project, the ESA encouraged Invader to create a mosaic art piece for the International Space Station.

In the film universe created by George Lucas, so-called ‘space waffles’ are mentioned repeatedly as a type of food that could be found on the planet Lothal.

In 2007, Invader had thought about staging one of his ‘Invasions’ underwater. After contacting British artist, environmentalist and underwater photographer Jason deCaires Taylor, in 2012  three Invader works were installed alongside some deCaires Taylor sculptures at the bottom of Cancún Bay, off the western coast of Mexico. Invader named this series of Invasions his ‘Under The Sea’ project.

Since the early 2000s, Invader's art has expanded from its original motif of the Space Invader into new icons inspired by other 8-bit video games like Pac-man, as well as figures like the Pink Panther, Spider-Man and Popeye.

Invader claimed that after having spent fifteen years disseminating Space invaders across the globe, it only seemed logical to push the boundaries of Street Art even further, into space. The prints speak to Invader’s desire to explore outer space, if not directly at least through his artworks.