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 (rows or columns) based on any color value (hue, saturation, value, or the amount of red, green or blue). 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 like this one 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.