Sneak has recently noticed some strange mosaics on walls near to Sneak's central-London base of operations. There is one on a post in Neal Street, Covent Garden; another high on a brick wall in St Anne's Court, Soho; and yet another on an otherwise barren concrete surface in Broadwick Street. Each image, picked out in small square tiles cemented to the surface, appears to depict a classic 70s-era Space Invader. So, Sneak wonders: who erected these images; when; and what for? And are there others that Sneak has yet to discover? The only vaguely similar concept that Sneak can bring to mind is war-chalking, a system of coded marks supposedly employed by hackers to identify prime sites for grabbing a bit of poorly-secured wireless bandwidth. Sneak for one hopes that these marks are not the extraterrestrial equivalent: markers laid down by shadowy alien invaders to indicate prime sites for body-snatching...

04 Jun 2004