Cut, Paste, GIF: Geoff Kim Turns Collage Art into Animation

Once reserved for second grade art projects and decorating your locker with Tiger Beat hotties, collage as a medium has recently become a respected art form in more than just your burn book. Geoff Kim, a graphic designer and artist working in New York, is taking the tactile, age-old form of cut-and-paste off of the shelves (and the page) and onto the internet. Using cut outs from 1970s National Geographic magazines, found online images from Tumblr and Flickr, and manipulated digital patterns, Kim's vibrant collages are brought to life with simple animation techniques, turning still images into hypnotizing GIF art.

Juxtaposing analog photography with Tumblr memes, Geoff has psychedelic aesthetic with a hip-hop edge—a distinct mashup of old and new. His work has been featured in The New York Times, used by brands like Nike and Virgin, and can been seen every week as the cover art for THUMP's "Mixed By" playlist series. This year, his analog-turned-digital style has come full circle, following a commission from underground rapper Lyrics Born to collage the cover of his soon to be released LP.

The Creators Project caught up with Geoff Kim about his influences—both on the web and IRL—and how he hopes to expand the grade school collage medium into the digital age, where everyone can be an artist.

The Creators Project: How did you get started doing collage?

Geoff Kim: I started collaging for my senior thesis, when I was doing media studies at the New School. I did a project on combining old media with new media, and I started taking images from the Internet and creating new pictures from them. The internet has so many images through Tumblr or Flickr, I just go through and save them on my computer, and then cut them up on Photoshop.

I played with a lot of Legos as a kid, and I kind of feel like collage is like that. You’re building something big from a lot of small things. It’s childish, really. I never thought I would be doing what I did in kindergarten as a real job.

What are some of your influences, online and off?

I love old National Geographic magazines from the 70s. They are shot in kodachrome and have such great colors. I also am pretty into this guy Otaku Gangsta who collects images of dystopian Japanese samurai weird stuff on his Tumblr, very dark web. But I’m also into psychedelic, colorful flowers. It depends on the project. For THUMP's "Mixed By," I listen to the artist’s music and then try to put a surreal twist on it. It’s a surrealist pop culture aesthetic.

When I first began crafting collages in 2010, I was jumping into an already loosely established community of collage artists—some fringe collage groups that were either aware or collaborating with each other via collage books or mail collaborations. Now that showcasing work online has become so ubiquitous, there's a renaissance of artists all showing their work and becoming more of a community in person.

People are beginning to realize, consciously or not, that collage is a connective tissue of the old world to the new. Bringing old world visual culture to a new era, transformed and re-purposed.

And what brought you into making your collage GIFs and animations?

My GIFs were always very rudimentary, just an image spinning or a horse running or something fading in. It was all made frame by frame. Then I met Miki Murata, on OKCupid actually! She’s an animator and she’s been expanding the movements of the images in a whole new way. She sees the still collages I do and she can imagine it moving, and then she makes it happen. She didn’t want to date me but I got a great business partner out of it.

"Frank Ocean" redux w/ motion

A collage animation by Kim and Murata.

Do you think of GIFs as an art form? Do you see a future for this medium?

GIFs are becoming easier to make and people are discovering how fun it is to make bite sized movies. Snapchat, Vines, these are all a new evolution of GIFs and short movies. How they'll exist in art is still being discovered.

Do you feel that your style changes when you are making digital collages compared to your physical paper collages?

Yeah, a bit. I always try to apply the same ideas and structures working whether it's with analog or digital. With analog you're much more embodied in the work itself. With digital it's more cerebral. Digital frees up endless possibilities, that's for sure, but that can be detrimental for some people. Using a digital screen as opposed to using your hands is an entirely different experience. I like to use both in varying amounts, depending on the project.

Collage has become sort of a trending art form in recent years, why do you think that is?

It’s kind of like Star Wars. In the first movies all the effects were done with actual models. The Death Star model was actually blown up, and it still looks great on film. But when you watch those later Star Wars movies that used CGI, it seems weirdly outdated now, even more than the older movies. With so much digital, people like analog. They are attracted to lo-fi, to the reality of it.

Collage has become a particular medium of our time. Like sampling culture in hip-hop and the improvised layers of sound in jazz, it gives a visual answer to those same principles of improvisation. I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag, but everyone can do collage. It’s easy. You just need an eye for it.

The Grand Budapest Hotel #mashable #oscars #oscars2015 #academyawards #thegrandbudapesthotel

A photo posted by Geoff J. Kim (@geoffjkim) on Feb 22, 2015 at 4:09pm PST

Whiplash was intense hence this portrayal. #mashable #oscars #oscars2015 #academyawards #whiplash

A photo posted by Geoff J. Kim (@geoffjkim) on Feb 22, 2015 at 4:11pm PST

A series of collages inspired by Oscar nominated films for Mashable

Follow Geoff Kim on Instagram for more collages and GIFs.

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