Glass has fascinated me for a long time. It is fragile and durable at once, transparent and material, able to reflect light and to let it through. Bottles made by Roman glassmakers still turn up whole in excavations, long after the empire that made them is gone.
In the history of art glass has always played a special role. It is often said that the stained-glass windows of medieval cathedrals told stories to people who could not read, a claim that some historians of art dispute. About the light there is little dispute. On an afternoon in a cathedral, colored panes lay red and blue stains across the stone floor and turned the whole space into something close to mystical.
In a way, GlassStories tries to return to that idea, in which a story is an object as well as a text. When we look at a story set on a glass card, light begins to co-create the image. It shifts the colors and reveals details we had not noticed before.
Glass has one more property: it resembles a screen. For centuries glass was a window, and within our lifetime it became a screen. Today we meet most stories through tablets, phones and computers, and in that sense digital glass is the natural heir of the panes of the past. Between the window and the screen stands the hologram, the word at the center of this project: light written into a glass plate, now released into layers of digital glass.
That is why GlassStories exists in two forms at once. In its physical form the story is printed on a real glass card. In its digital form it lives as image, voice and narrative in the Hologlass of the package.
Two worlds.
One story.