# Fragment Shaders & UV Space

**Track:** 3D, Shaders & AI Intuition — Creative Coding — the existing 50
**Framework / surface:** GLSL
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** Color, Trigonometry with Sin & Cos

**In one line:** A tiny program per pixel on the GPU — compute a colour from a coordinate.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

A fragment shader is a small program the GPU runs independently for every pixel, computing a color from little more than a coordinate. Because thousands run in parallel, the model inverts ordinary drawing: rather than move a brush, one writes a rule that each point evaluates for itself. UV space — a normalized coordinate grid laid over the surface — is the canvas. The demoscene refined this parallel thinking inside kilobyte-sized intros, and Patricio Gonzalez Vivo and Jen Lowe's The Book of Shaders turned it into pedagogy. The aesthetic is procedural and self-similar: image as function rather than stored pixels, where mathematics is felt directly as light.