Getting street smart over street art: Meet the man hunting aliens in Paris

Whether he's on his bike, walking or in a taxi, Morgan Collerie is always looking up.

Not at Paris' famed Haussmann architecture or its iconic landmarks: he's on the hunt for aliens. Or at least one artist's interpretation of them.

More than 1,500 pixelated art mosaics styled after the 1970s arcade cult-classic 'Space Invaders' are scattered around the city, including one cheekily placed on the Eiffel Tower.

"There's three of them there," he said in Paris, pointing at giant orange columns outside the city's famous modern art museum Centre Pompidou. "We have Donkey Kong in the middle and two invaders."

Fans like Collerie 'hunt' them down with the app Flash Invaders. They use their phones to take photos of the aliens, earning points for each one collected.

"It's an artistic way to do this and because I love video games," said Collerie, a top scorer among nearly 400,000 players.

"Usually when you say to people I play video games is like, 'oh, you playing all alone in your room?'. And with this, we have to go outside and it's like video games but in the city."

Collerie has been a fan of Space Invaders for more than a decade and started to use the app in 2019.

An elusive figure behind Paris' alien art

The artist behind the mosaics is as elusive as UK street-artist Banksy. He simply goes by "Invader", often gluing and arranging the tiles in the middle of the night.

On the Space Invaders website he said his work is "first of all about liberating art from its usual alienators that museums or institutions can be.

"But it is also about freeing the Space Invaders from their video games TV screens and to bring them into our physical world."

The pixelated mosaics first appeared in Paris in the late 1990s and have since invaded nearly every continent. There are more than 4,000 around the world in London, New York and Hong Kong.

"With my friend, we decided to go for a vacation in New York and London because there are very good ones there," said Morgan.

He said the game has also introduced him to new corners of Paris and players from around the world.

The goal, he said, is not to hunt down every single invader but to simply enjoy the process. He adds: "I don't want the journey to end. I prefer to pass my whole life hunting."

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