Biography
Glass is a material made of silicon and oxygen atoms bonded together in a highly rigid network. Its bonds are strong, but unlike metal, glass has almost no ability to rearrange its atoms to absorb stress: it does not bend, it accumulates. A tiny scratch or defect is therefore enough to concentrate that tension. When a bond finally breaks, the crack propagates suddenly from one point to the next, as if the entire network had suddenly found a way to come apart.
To the eye, this fracture appears as an explosion of lines branching through the material. To the ear, it becomes a sharp snap, a chime, followed by a multitude of small impacts. Glass barely deforms before it disappears: it transforms the tension held within its bonds directly into cracks, fragments, and vibrations. A motionless structure that, in a fraction of a second, becomes movement.
