Every digital image is a grid. This fact is both obvious and easy to ignore. But this structure affords opportunities for operations like sorting a series of pixels (columns, in this case) based on any color value (hue, in this case). Sorting pixels through the use of custom-created software is willfully naive of the content represented in the image. This can yield strange effects when the content legible in the image deviates from a gridded order (as is the case in this line drawing) or if the pixels are chromatically varied in local territories (as is the case with a noisy image or one that was purposefully dithered or optimized for compression).

Often, the partially sorted pixels (or in this case, the act of sorting) is more compelling than a completely sorted image.