Pixel Sort — Glitch Art from Any Photo

Pixel Sort is a creative-coding technique that turns a photo into glitch art by sorting runs of pixels along each row or column by some key — usually luminance or hue. The signature look (smeared color streaks broken by sharp untouched regions) comes from sorting only the pixels above a threshold, leaving everything else untouched. Originally popularized by Kim Asendorf, pixel sort is now a staple of generative and glitch art.

For each row (or column, depending on direction), the algorithm walks pixels and identifies contiguous runs where the sort key exceeds the threshold. Each run is sorted in place by its key (and optionally reversed). The result writes back into a fresh ImageData buffer. The implementation runs on CPU because the variable-length run boundaries are inherently sequential per row; full-image sort completes in tens of milliseconds for typical web images.