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If you aren't familiar with SDFs, some rough intuition for what's going on here: you have some primitive functions that define shapes, you have combinators that distort shapes, and you then have combinators that distort space. And then when you trace rays through distorted space, you render an image that looks like your combinators distorted the shapes themselves, but really you're distorting the path that your rays travel along.
The operation here is that you distort space with the modulo operator. So now you have space that repeats -- and when you trace rays through this repeated space, you're basically teleporting the rays back to the origin (using mod in the classic "wrapping around" fashion) every time they pass out of a section of space.
And then ultimately the ray will collide with the shape -- the one shape -- that exists in this distorted space, after wrapping around some number of times.
If the idea of "taking the mod of space" is intriguing, I would encourage you to try playing with SDFs! It's a really incredible technique for real-time rendering of "3D vector graphics."
Also shameless plug for my SDF playground https://bauble.studio, and an example program that uses instanced repetition to render an "infinite" number of varying shapes:
(tile [400 0 300] (fn [i]
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