Invader Weekly Roundup #11

Invader Weekly Roundup

This week: Paris closes out a Space Invaders sub-series with two fresh additions (PA_1569 and PA_1570), while London, New York, and Fontainebleau take hits with three destructions logged in as many days. A quieter week on the press front, but the city-by-city pulse tells its own story.

Paris caps a series, and the rest of the map takes a beating

The headline news this week comes out of Paris, where Invader added PA_1569 and PA_1570 — explicitly flagged in the event feed as "les deux derniers SI parisiens," the last two pieces in a Parisian Space Invaders sub-series. For a city that already dominates the global map with 48 events tracked (nearly triple any other city), capping a series like this feels less like routine maintenance and more like a punctuation mark. Hunters in the 11th — and wherever PA_1569 and PA_1570 actually landed — now have two fresh targets to chase before someone else gets the first flash. Paris also saw a status update on PA_1275, the kind of housekeeping note that usually signals damage, repair, or a change in visibility worth checking in person.

The same week, however, was brutal elsewhere. London lost LDN_129 to degradation on the 7th, and the 8th brought a double blow with destructions of FTBL_36 in Fontainebleau and NY_176 in New York. Three cities, three pieces gone or compromised inside 48 hours. It's a sharp reminder of what makes this whole project so emotionally charged: every mosaic out there is borrowed time. The ceramic-tile-as-permanent-medium idea is a beautiful one, but the street always gets the final say. If you've got an un-flashed invader sitting on a "next trip" list, this is your nudge.

The shape of the map right now

Zooming out from the week's events, the broader activity map continues to reinforce what regulars already feel intuitively: Paris is the heart, Europe is the body, and the rest of the world is a constellation of passionate outposts. Paris alone accounts for roughly 35% of documented global events, with Bern and London tied at 11 events apiece as secondary European hubs. Across the Atlantic, Los Angeles (13) and New York (9) anchor North America, while São Paulo (12) holds down South America almost single-handedly and Hong Kong (3) flies the flag for an Asia-Pacific scene that's been quieter than its history suggests. This week's destructions hitting London, NYC, and Fontainebleau all land squarely in those high-activity zones — which is exactly where you'd expect attrition to bite hardest, since more pieces and more foot traffic mean more wear, more cleanup crews, and more opportunistic removals.

Worth a click

Curated sources were largely static this week, but the open-web surfaced a piece worth bookmarking for anyone deep in the lore: GraffitiStreet's coverage of Invader's nineteenth London invasion wave, here, is a useful companion read given that London just lost LDN_129 — context for how the city's stock has been built up wave by wave, even as individual pieces fall. MyArtBroker's perpetual guide to the top 10 places to find an Invader original also resurfaced in this week's deltas, which, taken together with the Paris series-cap, makes for a fitting week to think about the geography of this whole project: where it concentrates, where it thins out, and where it's quietly disappearing.