RANGEBLENDS · RELIEF FROM A LAW
Three laws decide everything here. Where each mark sits comes from square-shell addressing.
How big it is comes from its rank, v2(g+1). And how it is lit comes from skylight — the
shape of the sky a point sees, as spherical harmonics.
Turn the cues off one at a time and watch it fall flat. The lighting is what does the lifting, and it is the one nobody else can keep consistent across a field with no edge — because every mark works out its own light from its own address, rather than copying a neighbour or reading a stored texture.
Flat op-art shimmers because the eye fights a pattern, but every element shares one baked appearance, so nothing stands above the page. A generator could shade each mark separately — but it has to stream or store, so a large field costs memory and the light drifts or must be baked down.
This is addressed. Each mark solves the same law at its own address, so the field has no edge and the light never breaks: you could walk two million columns along it and every highlight would still agree with every other one, with nothing stored anywhere to make it so.
The other half of an illusion is the reversal — the eye catches hardest where a gradient turns back on itself. Press Fold at eight and the field reorganises: each aligned block of eight slots reverses, so the pattern runs one way and then the other, and the seam between them is placed by arithmetic rather than drawn.