A Beautiful Love Story Between Two Glitch Art Twitter Bots

In the world of bot-powered Twitter accounts, the above image was like Romeo first laying eyes upon Juliet.

It began like this: after Bob Poekert’s colorful @a_quilt_bot sent an unassuming infographic to @pixelsorter, a bot whose algorithms turn images into beautiful, pixel-sorted glitch art, @pixelsorter sent @a_quilt_bot an image in return, signaling the beginning of a beautiful “conversation” between the two algorithmically-driven robo-Tweeps. 

The result, as discovered by The New Aesthetic, was a cascading series of images created from one single image. First, @a_quilt_bot built up patchwork photos. Then, @pixelsorter sent them back all pixel-pushed and glitched-out, and so on. While @pixelsorter had interacted other bots before, a process creator Way Spurr-Chen documented in a blog post here, @pixelsorter’s glitchy changes made particularly beautiful images for @a_quilt_bot to work with. Simply put, it was a match made in robot heaven.

The algorithmically-generated conversation between @a_quilt_bot and @pixelsorter went something like this:

First, @pixelsorter responded to @a_quilt_bot’s original image (above). 

After @a_quilt_bot replied, all systems were go. Keep in mind, every tweet that follows was created from the single image at the top of this post:

But the story doesn’t end there: after a few days of back and forth botting, human tweeter @jleedev threw his own image into the mix, also tagging the tweetbot @badpng. Apparently even in the world of tweetbots, two’s company, but three’s a crowd—@pixelsorter and @a_quilt_bot’s algorithms couldn’t maintain the conversation with a third party involved. Below, the bots’ final exchange:

Whether @a_quilt_bot couldn’t handle @badpng’s cacophonous glitches, or became jealous that @Pixelsorter was fooling around with other bots, we might never know. Thankfully, we’ll always remember the good times. 

Check out the whole colorful robo-conversation here.

h/t The New Aesthetic

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