In the beginning, glitch art was the appreciation of how software hiccups can distort an image. Depending on who you asked, glitch art only qualified as glitch art if the aesthetic cracks happened by accident. Then the medium evolved, and some digital artists began to force those errors by editing code and manipulating pixels.

At first blush, the images created with a new software called PixelDrifter look like yet more glitch art. In fact, the choppy, blurred effects seen here are the result of a new method called “pixel sorting.”

Russian electronic musician Dmitriy Krotevich wrote the code for PixelDrifter for fun. He’s not a programmer, but he had been tinkering with a pixel-sorting code created by computer artist Kim Asendorf, and was impressed. In PixelDrifter, which Krotevich built from scratch, each pixel has a “power” value determined by its luminosity or position on the screen. With a little prodding (by setting options in the software) from the user, the pixels will move and switch position with other pixels.

“By default, each pixel tries to find the ‘weakest’ pixel among its closest neighbors and if one is found, they swap their positions,” Krotevich says. “Also pixels with a higher ‘power’ value can do more ‘swaps.’ ” Put differently, the pixels are imbued with enough intelligence to behave autonomously, although Krotevich says, “an experienced user can predict a result.”

Dmitriy Krotevich

Krotevich compares PixelDrifter to Conway's Game of Life, the math game invented in 1970 by mathematician John Horton Conway. There are no players in Life, just an initial pattern input—in the form of units on a gridded system, like a checker board—that then reconfigures according to a set algorithm. As much as Conway's Game of Life seems quaint today, when everything is quantified and algorithm-powered, it was ground-breaking for its time. After Scientific American published a story about the game, it spawned a ton of interest for computer scientists and physicists, and laid the early groundwork for generative designers who would later user computers to conceive wild and complex patterns.

The appeal of PixelDrifter lies in that psuedo-artificial intelligence: The software lets illustrators relinquish just enough control to get an organic twistedness. It's a little like splatter painting, but with pixels. So far the ready-to-use software has been put to use by illustrators, designers, and visual artists for pieces like album covers and visuals for live performances. More images can be seen over at the PixelDrifter Tumblr.