On Twitter, bad news comes at all hours, with the latest political scandal chasing the most recent military action. The site is an informational storm surge, and it's tempting to log off forever. But I’ve found another strategy for coping with the deluge: I follow a small army of artistically inclined Twitter bots, peculiar creations that intermittently populate my dispiriting feed with subtly strange images. Scattered amongst the day’s more troubling reports, they provide brief moments of solace—soothing without suppressing real facts.

Call them the social media version of escapism. They're like kitten pictures, except they're built from code instead of fluff.

@veilbymist the cloud maker

One of the most unusual bots is @veilbymist. Every three hours, it presents its followers with an image of otherworldly clouds, their unearthly colors texturing into one another, even as bright bursts of light sometimes cut through the haze. Under other circumstances, these alien skies might be off-putting, but when they crop up amid more terrestrially troubling news, they can have a strangely calming effect. If Twitter is the water in which we swim, these gaseous images at least remind us to return to the surface and breathe deep.

The creation of an Icelandic artist named Michael Christophersson, @veilbymist emerged out of a desire to show off a series of abstract images that he’d been producing. The bot itself doesn’t create those images; instead, it simply selects them from a large, curated library of his favorite work. But Christophersson’s methodology still relies heavily on algorithmic randomness.

Christophersson told Ars that he begins by rendering a fractal environment in Terragen, a graphics program that helps designers create virtual environments. He then distorts and complicates the images in After Effects, “sometimes forming entirely new and unexpected patterns and colors. Glitches are expected, desired.” That process, which can take hours or days, ultimately yields thousands of options from which Christophersson manually selects his favorites, which he renders again at higher resolution and makes accessible to the bot. In other words, @veilbymist’s output is a combination of deliberate design and circumstantial contingency.

@softlandscapes’ layers of complexity

Slightly similar principles enable @softlandscapes, a bot by George Buckenham. It offers its followers sparse, but deeply layered, images of terrain: jagged hillsides and towering mesas that press up against the sky. These features stand out against one another thanks to the images’ slowly shifting hues. Cool in more than one sense, those faint shades refuse to oversell themselves.

For those overwhelmed by the immediate, Soft Landscapes provides an occasional opportunity to pause and survey the middle distance. These are images of life down the road, of mountains that we can safely study before we trudge up their slopes.

Like Soft Landscapes’ output, the underlying code that generates these vistas works, as Buckenham said, “in layers of complexity” that rely on both the language, Tracery—which many other bot designers also employ—and the Scalable Vector Graphics image format. “For the mountains, it starts at a random coordinate and generates the line by moving along a little and going randomly up or down, and continuing until it’s past the end of the screen,” Buckenham explained over e-mail. “It randomly generates the gradients on the mountains and in the sky, and it layers them up on top of each other so the ones behind bleed through. That’s how come the colors coordinate, despite generally being picked at random from the whole RGB space.”

Space and landscape bots

Given that these bots go hours between posts—and that news arrives much more quickly these days—it’s worth following a few others as well. One popular option is @tiny_star_fields, which produces spare solar images using ASCII-like characters. Where Soft Landscapes sometimes evokes the backgrounds of an arty point-and-click adventure game, Tiny Star Fields evokes an earlier era of gaming that relied as much on the player’s imagination as it did on the designers’ ingenuity.

Buckenham also pointed me to a handful of other compelling possibilities, including @_cavebot, which stylistically echoes Soft Landscapes, even as its more gently curving lines suggest secluded interiority:

Christophersson, for his own part, told me that he loves “bots—and humans—that create and share beautiful and interesting images, words, and ideas or concepts.” One of his favorites is @archillect, an automated curation algorithm that crawls the Internet in search of compelling images. Though there are few obvious connections between its finds, they are invariably striking, often featuring crisp lines and strong color contrasts. At times, they even evoke Buckenham’s work:

None of these bots can heal the world, of course—not that anyone’s asking them to. Nevertheless, there’s something comforting about their idiosyncratic and quasi-autonomous methodologies. Regardless of what’s happening around them, they carry on, furnishing us with images unbound by the chaos of our human lives. Theirs is an ambiguous consolation, but they make our digital lives a little more bearable.

Listing image by Michael Christophersson