The History of Shaders as Digital Art

Yo team, this is a walk through the history of shaders as digital art. I cut my teeth in the digital landscape making flyers with early photoshop for Raves in the late 90's. One thing led to another, I've dabbled in a bit of all mediums over the years, and I'm still fascinated by where technology is taking humans. I went back through my video reference material from the last few years, rounded it out with some key historical pieces, and traced how shaders evolved from a few triangles to the coolest visuals on earth.

From Loren Carpenter's fractal mountains in 1978 up to Vibe coding in 2026. I compiled references spanning the early days of fractal math turning a few triangles into landscapes and Pixar's RenderMan shading language in 1988, to HLSL and GLSL bringing programmable shaders to everyday graphics. Then we move on to WebGPU and WGSL bringing a modern stack to the web and the final segment of the vibe coding era leveling the playing field for anyone with internet access and an AI helper.