In Space Invaders: Boundary Issues (Disk 1), Arlo Sinclair revisits one of gaming’s earliest icons, reworking it into a satirical emblem of territorial anxiety and digital nostalgia. The oversized floppy disk, fabricated in acrylic and aluminium and finished with a hand-painted label, reimagines Taito’s 1978 classic as “Serious boundary issues edition!”—a tongue-in-cheek play on both gameplay mechanics and broader cultural tensions.

Sinclair’s use of the floppy disk as canvas collapses timelines: the 1970s arcade era, the 1980s–90s reign of floppy storage, and today’s reflective distance from both. The weathered label, with its scuffed corners and faded type, transforms mass-produced entertainment into a fossilized cultural artifact, at once absurd and strangely monumental. The pixelated alien, enlarged and boxy, remains a potent symbol of both playful invasion and persistent unease, carrying echoes of Cold War paranoia, technological disruption, and the contemporary politics of borders.

As with his broader 2024–2025 cycle, Sinclair elevates discarded technological forms into icons of cultural memory. Each hand-painted label, distressed and imperfect, draws attention to the fragility of physical media while also parodying the permanence of the myths attached to them. Here, the collision of humor and critique resonates: Space Invaders: Boundary Issues, is not just about a game, but about the anxieties encoded in play—about control, defense, and intrusion.

Rooted in the Pop Art tradition yet sharpened by contemporary satire, the work embodies Sinclair’s fascination with obsolescence and cultural remixing. By isolating the floppy against a stark white field, he elevates it from relic to icon, transforming a simple storage disk into a commentary on nostalgia, paranoia, and the invisible boundaries—digital and political—that shape collective memory.