WebGL · GLSL Shader
Future Lag
A real-time GLSL fragment shader, running on the GPU at 60fps in your browser. Distortion fields and perceptual delay rendered from a single math file.
What it is
Future Lag is a fragment shader. A single function, run once per pixel per frame, on a parallel hardware path that was originally designed to rasterize triangles for video games and now runs the matrix multiplies that produced the model you're probably using to read this site.
The piece is a meditation on that gap. The low-level math of a GPU compute pipeline sits underneath every interesting thing AI does, but almost no one thinks about it. Future Lag tries to make the substrate visible: distortion fields that warp and reform, an aesthetic of something powerful working just below the surface of the screen.
Why a shader
Working in GLSL forces you to think about the world as a function from coordinates to color. No frames. No state. No DOM. Just a math expression that has to produce something coherent thirty million times a second. It's a useful discipline for thinking about other systems.