Pictures Of Sunsets And Mountains Get Algorithmically Twisted Into Abstract Beauty

Mountains and sunset

Seam carving is a technique that can be used to resize an image without the need to crop it dramatically or stretch it. It’s also what artist Jeff Thompson uses to create the images for his Seam Sorting series—images that look like some otherworldly topography.

Thompson uses a modded version of Photoshop’s seam carving algorithm for his creations whereby “a line of least energy is mapped through a found image (downloaded from Google) from bottom-center to the top. This line of pixels is gathered, sorted by color, and put back in place in the new sorted order. This line is then shifted one pixel to the right and the process repeated across the entire image.”

Once he’s completed the above the custom software saves the image and rotates it 90 degrees, then repeats the process a number of times resulting in “taffy-like twisting and strange, emergent forms” so the original image is completely unrecognizable.

Interestingly Thompson notes how the reworked images—images of deserts, mountains, and sunsets work best he says—keep the exact pixel data but just reorganize it “like milk stirred into coffee”. So you could still be looking at an image of a sunset, but just one that’s been seam carved into abstraction. He then turns the images into large scale prints. 

Desert

Mountain and grass

Mountains and sunset

Mountains and sunset

Mountains and sunset