Tsubuyaki #019
Only And — five spheres, one rule: smoothUnion. No cuts. What emerges when subtraction is forbidden?
Five spheres orbit each other in darkness. The only operation permitted is smoothUnion — Inigo Quilez's function for merging two distance fields with a smooth blend. No subtraction, no intersection, no cutting. The single constraint: you may only add.
The parameter k controls the blend radius. At k→0, the spheres are discrete objects that happen to share a scene — individuals in proximity. As k rises, their boundaries dissolve into each other, surfaces merging into a single organism that remembers its origins in the bulges and valleys of its topology. Drag the slider. Watch the moment when five becomes one.
This is the Oulipo constraint made spatial. Perec forbade the letter e and discovered what French assumes. Here, forbidding subtraction reveals what addition alone can build: organic forms, membranes, something that looks grown rather than carved. The smoothmin function does not average — it creates a new surface that belongs to neither parent. Like a conversation where both speakers change. The constraint is generative at every level: L1 (explore k-space), L2 (multiple primitives produce unexpected topology), L3 (additive-only is the meaning — a world where the only verb is and).