The Art of Twitter Art - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-art...

The Art of Twitter Art

Treat a tweet like a canvas, 140 characters at a time.

Filter Forge; Kerry Lannert/Flickr/The Atlantic

SHIRLEY LI | FEB 12, 2015 | TECHNOLOGY

A typical Twitter feed is a stream of letters and words. There is photo-

sharing, and plenty of it, but Twitter isn't meant for album-making (that's a

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The Art of Twitter Art - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-art...

job for Facebook, Flickr, Imgur, etc.); it's meant for real-time, text-based,
140-character updates.

And yet, every now and then, tweets like this one pop up:

Follow
@artonaline

12:21 PM - 8 Jul 2014

589 350

Welcome to the world of Twitter art, a whimsical, boundless space

dominated by image-generator bots and ASCII character codes and
hand-drawn cartoons. Twitter art appears unexpectedly in streams.
Twitter art is experimental. Twitter art even interacts with other Twitter
art.

But Twitter art is also hard. Its creators face a tricky challenge: They work
on a site designed primarily for posting limited text, so users rarely stop
and stare at tweets the way they might pause to appreciate other visual art
forms. "Twitter is not the best platform for sharing art because of its

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The Art of Twitter Art - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-art...

presentation," G.P. Lackey, an artist and one of the creators behind the
bot @GenerateACat, says. "It's dicult because it has a constantly
changing current."

Lackey and his fellow @GenerateACat creator Bronson Zgeb use the
simplest methoduploading images through a botto get around
Twitter's 140-character parameters. They treat the account like an online
gallery-slash-laboratory that updates whenever a batch of new images are
available. And there are hundreds of images they can feed into the account
at a time. Each "cat" is created based on a combination of randomized
characteristics, including color, shape, expression, and even whisker
length. Add a randomly generated phrase to include with the cat, and
voil, a cat, generated:

Generate A Cat Bot Follow

@GenerateACat

I just realized a rubbish cat

7:01 AM - 1 Jan 2015

1 4

The bots-and-online-gallery method is a popular approach. There are bots

similar to @GenerateACat that make variations of one image
(@GenerateAFace makes faces, @OmgGeospheres makes 3-D-looking
faces), bots that create wholly random images (@GreatArtBot makes
pixelated art), and bots that tweet archival content (@BookImages grabs

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The Art of Twitter Art - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-art...

historical images from books in the Internet Archive).

And then there are Twitter art bots that are interactive, that try to make
their feeds more than just galleries. Lackey recommends @badpng bot,
which re-encodes images into cacophonous line art, as well as
@LowpolyBot, which regurgitates polygon versions of the pictures it
receives, like this one (which also happens to be a response to another art
bot, @A_Quilt_Bot):

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The Art of Twitter Art - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-art...

Quilt Bot @a_quilt_bot 10 Feb 15

@Lowpolybot pic.twitter.com/TcOtNJADgk

Lowpoly Bot Follow

@Lowpolybot

.@a_quilt_bot Your picture is ready:#voronoi #gradient #edges

#white #thin pic.twitter.com/p1nslWLssi
4:23 AM - 10 Feb 2015

6 6

But Twitter art isn't just about bots generating images and tweeting at each

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The Art of Twitter Art - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-art...

other (which, incidentally, another bot, @imgconvos, tracks and

transforms into animations, because why not?). It's also for the artists who
create ASCII or Unicode characters-based art without uploading images,
willingly constraining themselves to Twitter's limits.

One of these artists, Matthew Haggett, created @tw1tt3rart in 2009 to

join the few other artists who were making ASCII art on the site. Twitter's
constraints didn't scare him o. "The limitation of 140 characters made it
interesting," Haggett tells me. "There was denitely an element of puzzle-
solving."

@tw1tt3rart Follow
@tw1tt3rart

COFFEE
TIME


#TwitterArt
9:25 AM - 16 Jul 2012

556 114

Over time, Haggett accumulated nearly 85,000 followers, and Twitter

itself began to change. He notes how, when he started, he couldn't do line
returns in tweets, so the art wouldn't "stack," and his illustrations would
tend to look dierently on mobile devices. Now, Haggett says, "Twitter
has shifted away from text-only and towards multimedia with in-stream
photos, videos, and the like. That opens the door to a lot of artists, and
expands the ways for artists to share their content."

Those artists include Jonny Fox, creator of @ArtOnALine and its

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The Art of Twitter Art - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-art...

companion account, @C0NSTELLATl0NS, two popular ASCII-based

Twitter art accounts, with about 40,000 and 3,500 followers,
respectively.

Both manage to, despite the tougher challenge of correctly spacing the
characters and tting them into a tweet, transform the idea of a "tweet"
and break up the ow of text in the news feeds of followers. Tweets can
take many forms, from ones that display a few strategically placed words
to ones that use other characters to make words themselvescreations
that follow the basic tenets of ASCII art. Here, one @ArtOnALine creation
uses emojis and forces the tweet to stretch down the length of the screen:

Follow
@artonaline

3:30 PM - 2 Sep 2014

1,008 631

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The Art of Twitter Art - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-art...

And here, a constellation:

C0NSTELLATl0NS Follow
@C0NSTELLATl0NS

\
\
\



/





11:47 AM - 16 Dec 2013

88 48

While Fox drafts his tweets in his phone's Notes app, other Twitter art
creators use bots to produce similar Twitter art. Katie Rose Pipkin, for
example, uses bots like @100YearsRising (which illustrates sea level
changes), @Tiny_Star_Field (which imagines clusters of stars), and
@Unicode_Birds (which generates migratory ight patterns) to generate
ASCII art.

Bot or not, a Twitter art account attempts to change the text-based site
into something morea gallery, an experiment, an experience. As Fox put
it to The Airship:

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The Art of Twitter Art - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-art...

I think there's denitely a deeper reason for Twitter art than just
for fun... I think if I can make one person smile or provide them
with a little bit of something dierent than all the celebrity
nonsense and gossip and garbage on most people's Twitter
feeds, then that makes it all worthwhile. It's good to see art.

That's the same idea behind Lackey's work"The really basic goal that I
want to achieve is to surprise you a bit," he tells meas well as the one
behind the most traditional Twitter art of them all: the art on
@DrawnYourTweet. The cartoonist behind the account, Scott Weston,
randomly chooses a follower and illustrates by hand a tweet he sees on
their feed.

"My drawings are way of saying 'thank you,'" he explains in an email.

"They're unashamedly whimsical and literal interpretations of other
people's tweets."

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The Art of Twitter Art - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-art...

Stephen Clark @stephenclark 1 Feb 15

I don't care who wins the #SuperBowl ...I'm just rooting for a
wardrobe malfunction.

Drawn Your Tweet Follow

@drawnyourtweet

Hey @stephenclark I've just drawn your tweet. Enjoy.

#SuperBowl pic.twitter.com/k9aeJCVOjG
6:14 PM - 1 Feb 2015

17 26

Weston ends every tweet with a friendly "Enjoy," a word that could serve
as the motto for all Twitter art. Because between the random
bot-generated images and the carefully crafted ASCII art, these accounts
do little other than please their followers and the people who stumble upon

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The Art of Twitter Art - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/the-art...

them, by tweeting light, often spontaneous content. They're just accounts

that make art on Twitter, where a never-ending stream of text isevery so
often, if you're luckypunctuated by something else. Enjoy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SHIRLEY LI is a former editorial fellow with The Atlantic.

Twitter Email

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