Fragments

Fragments came out of learning to write vertex and fragment shaders in early 2021. A fragment shader runs a small program across every pixel of an image in parallel. Once I understood that, I became fascinated by the enormous amount of simultaneous computation hidden behind a single rendered frame.

The piece started with a question: what might it look like if that process could see itself? On the original Objkt page I described it as an attempt to visualise “the processing brain of my graphics work.” The result is a looping landscape of luminous slivers, with colour and height travelling across it in waves.

Repetition becomes structure

Fragments now feels closely connected to the focus of my current practice: complex systems built from simple rules. Shader programs are a particularly direct expression of that idea. The same compact instruction is evaluated over and over, while small differences in position, time and neighbouring values accumulate into a larger visual system.

At the time, the work was primarily a way to understand a new medium by turning its underlying behaviour into an image. Looking back, its subject and its method are the same thing: a simple operation repeated at scale until it becomes a world.

Fragments was released as an edition on Hic et Nunc on 22 March 2021. Its original record and edition history are preserved on Objkt.