Kerim Safa (Turkish, b. 1985) is a visual artist and musician who makes hand-drawn pixel animations and audiovisual works rooted in the aesthetics of early computer graphics and video games.,Working between algorithmic processes and labour-intensive, frame-by-frame animation, he builds looping, meditative systems where mechanical repetition and subtle variation coexist.,
Safa studied fine arts at Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir before earning a scholarship to study music composition at Istanbul Bilgi University.,That dual training continues to shape his work: concepts such as polyrhythm and phase shifting inform how his visual systems unfold over time, and he sometimes builds audiovisual pieces or performs live alongside other musicians.He moved to the Netherlands and began releasing his animations as NFTs in 2020. For a 2021 illustration commissioned by Noema Magazine on the theme of digital waste, he manually added and removed pixels over some 200 exports until the finished image measured exactly 1,380,512 bytes, the number stated within the artwork itself.
Monolithic Machines (2023), a series built around a central animation, The Monolith, and ten related Components, was made for the LED façade of the School of Digital Arts in Manchester as part of the exhibition “Hyperconnection”.,The work depicts an unending industrial process of boxes shifting through interlocking machinery, turning motion itself into the subject.In 2024 he began collaborating with Loïc Schwaller, known as loackme, on nullMachines, hand-drawn pixel tiles arranged with a wave-function-collapse algorithm into looping animated machines. The pair released it as a one-week open edition through the platform Verse, where 321 unique machines were collected.That September, Safa was also one of ten artists nominated for the Museum of the Moving Image's Schlosser Media Wall through its Community Curation initiative with the Tezos Foundation.,In 2025 he collaborated with Kristen Roos on ARCHITYPES, which animates pixel typefaces using the vintage technique of color cycling.
His work has been exhibited at venues including the Punto y Raya Festival at ZKM Karlsruhe, the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, and the Gashouder at Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam.In 2025 he was nominated for Emerging Artist of the Year at the ABS Digital Art Prize in Geneva.,
