Catalin Domniteanu

My work, Redshift Navigator, awarded "Best in Show" at Contemporary Art Gallery Online (Open 3D and Mixed Media).

https://www.contemporaryartgalleryonline.gallery/2021-openno-theme-winners?fbclid=IwAR2UDDaAriNPEeHF42bY7SF7Ga0wKPhSjEuhbp-WA0rNl_j08omok7dV0RQ

Happy to report that a documentary about one of my works has just been released. "The Light Catcher" talks about an adventure to understand knowledge, the role of chance, and the intimate structure of reality. 

A thousand thanks and congratulations to the producer, Rosu Corneliu, who knew how to go down the essence and tell the story. Warmest thanks to my musician friends Mihai Paveliu  and Hardy Braun. 

We will announce at a later date when and where it can be watched.

When Marcel Duchamp took industrially manufactured objects and placed them under the galleries’ spot lights on pedestals, I felt excessively uncomfortable. I was an engineer by then, who was routinely designing such artefacts. Some of my own tooling designs too were true works of art, I thought. To my colleagues amusement, I used to collect small pieces of scrap metal from the production line for their pulchritudinousness. And I would’ve sworn that the cable harnessing that I was doing for the railways industry, during my college internship, was electrifyingly beautiful. I had no doubt that that must’ve been the case. It’s true they were genuinely purposed for practical applications, which seemed to go against the idea of art, but taken out of their operational context, those industrial objects exhibit refined artistry in their (technically driven) compositions and executions. In that engineering world of mine, each edge and each surface had a purpose. Each part had a place in the assembly, and each assembly had a scope. That’s how it works.
“Look, wheels don’t go on top of stools, Marcel. They just don’t. If you want to be mesmerized, lift the front wheel of you bike, give it a spin and watch its spikes from close distance as they come in and out of your eye’s focal point. That’s it. The circuitry of the brain handling this very unusual flux of information does the rest. See that? Isn’t nature beautiful? Now, when you’re done, put the bike down and go ride it. On top. And leave the stool alone, would you?“
But he wouldn’t listen.

I wasn’t mutinous. Such non-canonical artistic approach wasn’t news for me. I had painting training. I grew up with a monumental park of modernistic metal sculptures on the charming riverfront of the Danube river, in Galati, Romania. I liked abstract art and surrealism before I knew what I was. I flirted with writing SF stories, which helped me questioning ideas about the way the world works. Including, for example, the most unsuspicious archetype learned by every atom of my bones and by every muscle fibre of my body, having lived forever on this planet, the gravity.

So, no, I wasn’t thrilled by the artist’s move. “Who’d do that?”, I yelped, melting away. Occasionally, yes, features can get placed meagerly by accident. Or by sabotage. Assuming that existence has meaning, that stool-wheel assemblage meant nothing but waste. We get better precisely by avoiding erroneous situations like that. So I was told. So it seemed. Then, what was Marcel telling me here? Perhaps how not to do things, at best. I wasn’t sure. If I would’ve understood him, my engineering projects would’ve been disastrous. I would’ve get fired immediately without notice. But I didn’t, so my career went on just fine, doing design work the right way.
“Because we, the engineers of the world, care for safety, so you, dear artist, you can do your public experimentation. Mm-hmm! That must be easy! Maybe I should do it!”
Well, I never told him that, no. Not before I understood him properly.

Designing the right way meant being a minimalist. Brâncuşi’s creed must’ve grown in me, I figured. Getting straight to the essence felt fair. No fluff, no sprinkles. And if it wasn’t for that, it was because engineering is in itself a functional minimalism. The closest one to the natural minimalism (i.e. the water taking the lowest energy path, or the spherical shape of a soap bubble, or the lowest energy level principle for electrons on atomic orbitals). So, on my drawing board, my lines were pursuing maximizing practicality while minimizing costs. Simply, that’s how the economic game is played. With every edge I loved turning mental images into tangible articles. The feeling of genesis was captivating, but I kind of confused it with free will. My long days went on reflecting upon the role that I was getting to play.
“Am I a creator in any way?”, I wondered.

I thought I was, but I wasn’t sure in what sense. I began a rigorous investigation starting from the macro level, where the eye can see and the finger can touch. There I’ve learned what I knew all along: machinery pieces don’t come out of nowhere. Before being machined, the bolt’s atoms were in a bar of raw material, and before that in an ore, and before that in the core of a star. I needed to go down to the level of the Plank scale where the smallest constituents of matter live. In that counterintuitive world words like being, position, or distance loose their meaning. I couldn’t keep track of what went where when, but I was told I can trust the inviolability of the energy conservation principle. So, I couldn’t be a creator in terms of “something from nothing”, but in the sense of transformation. That was good enough. I looked around. An aluminium bar pushed by hydraulic pressure through a hole in a die gets stretched into a long, uniform shape. Plastic resin melting, flowing, and then re-solidifying retains the shape of the cavity in which it was injected. A steel plate tooled by a CNC machine becomes a multi-surface piece with a sophisticated shape.
I was getting somewhere. My role, I fathomed, was to produce new shapes. I was a new-shape maker.

***
“Just a shape”, one may say. But that would be imprecise and I knew it. In ancient times, philosophers knew that nothing maintains its shape forever. In fact, not even for another instance. Not the coffee I drink, not the bronze group statue I admire at the University of Calgary, and not the photon reaching my retina after bouncing off of it, nothing stands still. Two and a half thousands year later, Julian Barbour, a brilliant British physicist, came up to me one day with a worldview claiming that the “ratio” (between two successive shapes) is to be regarded as the most fundamental characteristic of the universe. I thanked him. His approach was compatible with the more contemporary view of quantum mechanics, in which there are no forms / entities such as particles in the world but also fields (despite the fact that quantum mechanics confuses us with the wave-particle duality).
“Very clever, very eloquent, Julian!”

“No one can step in the same river twice”, said Heraclitus unto me one night, after a copious dinner. “Very well”, I replied. “Then I shall keep going with the flow, shouldn’t I?” “I dare you not to!”, he giggled.

According to this line of thinking, the natural state of the universe is the state of perpetual transformation. That’s a compulsory factor. But not any transformation is possible. There are rules for it, built within the laws of nature, like the energy range and the energy thresholds. The atomic orbital model is a clear example in quantum mechanical theory ("quantum" means discrete quantity). This is of great importance and Julian knows it. Because of such fine tuning conditions, the universe is possible and life itself exists. In my simplified mechanical designing world, this is equivalent to what we call “dimensional tolerance”. A practical application goes like this: the guillotine’s blades loose atoms with every sheet of steel (or paper) it cuts. The gap between the blades can’t be too large. So, once in a while the blades need to be reshaped and re-adjusted for the cuts to be always clean and straight. Practice showed that some shapes are more durable than others. In the case of the guillotine blades, there are specific geometries that maximize their service. There are many other examples, among which are my favorites: wheel (used for vehicles), the sphere (used on bearings), the convex/concave lenses (used on optical instruments like telescopes), the wheel-rail contact zone (used the rail wagon), the "I" beams (used to build bridges), the airfoils (used for the wings of the airplanes), etc. Aside from those, there are also shapes that don’t get mentioned in any of the disciplines of chemistry, physics, biology or mathematics for they are sterile. Some of the advantageous shapes were first discovered in nature, like those of the birds wings, or that of the honey comb. Others were discovered by abstract thinking, like the Penrose tiling, or the Möbius strip. These forms that have reached the textbooks have in common an attribute of great importance - utility, which is the basis of all engineering.

“You see now, Marcel, why I don’t appreciate your Urinal? The useful shape of a urinal is in a vertical position, placed in a bathroom with ventilation. With piping attached to it. How could you have missed that? How? Think of its designer, for a second. How does he feel now?”

***
OK, I must’ve metabolized this utility so well that I’m sanguinely attached to its merits. Time to redefining my role. Ask me again, and I’ll answer that I was an utilitarian creator of ephemeral shapes. That was my correct title. I wasn’t bothered by my shapes not being eternal; temporality should be good enough for a mortal. Moreover, I still had the purpose. “Engineered” is the antonym of “by chance”. My entire existence was operating under the principle of controlling the environment for predictable, desirable outcomes. Everybody, I thought, king or peasant, was striving to align their trajectory to the happiest imaginable path.
"Then why you, Marcel, care for chance?"

Chance is a strange word, I couldn’t afford it in my lexicon. Not only is the dissonance of its relationship with utility intolerable and engineers dislike it, but the word "chance" also carries negative connotations for theologians. Newton’s laws of motion already consolidated Plato’s view that the world is a succession of causal events. No longer Achilles’ spear was missing the enemy’s helmet because Neptune was clandestinely playing against him, but because his blood sugar was low that day, and it was windy. Or something like that. Random events seem, at first glance, clues to an unnatural hidden world. But the closer we look, the more causal relations we find between them until eventually the sophistication of investigation coupled with the observer’s problem (spectator and actor) makes it impractical. Beyond that level begin the domains where the word “chance” can’t be avoided – i.e.: radioactive decay, or quantum superposition. Some suggest that those "uncaused causes" may arise right there, which opens the door to "something from nothing." But equally it might be our ignorance, as Einstein made me believe.
However, to say "nothing happens by chance" isn’t the same as saying "everything happens for a reason". Pierre Simon Laplace insisted, while visiting my studio in a beautiful white winter, that everything goes by a cause, and there is no reason for it. I let him talk, since he came such a long way. Simon told me about his demon, which knows everything to be known about every particle of the universe at a certain moment. This “vast intelligence”, as he was calling it, with its humongous formula, is able to calculate the past of the universe from the beginning of time, and its future until eternity. “Right, right, right!”, I said. “But look, we don’t even have a little demon to calculate the stability of the Solar System with only eight (plus one) planets.” He was smiling. I wasn’t.

After he left, I went out to check my mailbox. I found that a couple of theologians had sent me epistles informing me that the Creation does have purpose, which is that of love, and that chance is prerequisite for free will. “OK, I like that kind of refinement”, I thought. And some scientists too sent me emails, after examining the subatomic world, advising me that the universe looks like having a purpose, otherwise what’s the deal with the Schrödinger’s cat? They were strongly asserting that the solely purpose of the universe is to be observed by conscientious beings.

“All right, I hear you. I’ll see what I can do”, I said.

***
So, what was Marcel into? This business of chanciness versus intentionality is important, I get it. Worth exploring it, after all. Of course, I wasn’t tempted to scramble the parameters of the hot-dip galvanization process in the shop, hoping for the best. I had clear objectives about the final product, for which I had created a coherent, reliable technological path. Not even in R&D, people don’t mix totally random things and expect funding the next year. To my defense, I was rightfully reluctant to some of the Dada’s chancy techniques. Tossing torn pieces of paper on the floor to uncover whatever novel narratives, totally independent from my thinking, wasn’t something I was prepared to embrace easily. The reality is that I was tormented by this process.

But then, out of nowhere, Martin Heidegger called me one day and told me assuredly in one breath that my pre-ontological understanding of things prevent me from reaching new ideas, which ideas live in far away places from my actual, paradigmatic realm. Hmm… OK! I felt frightened, I admit, but I was slowly beginning to see how thinking boundaries of whose existence I was unaware before may prevent me from knowing the real world. Full of excitement I told him right away that I liked it. I also asked him to review his take on time, I made a good case for it, but he wouldn’t answer. He continued, though, explaining me how I – he was calling me Dasein, which I found amusing - the observer who cannot be separated from the object of his investigation, am ought to provide access to the meaning of being. “Be there a meaning, Martin!”, I said. Little did he knew, I was myself too already accustomed to the observer’s problem from quantum mechanics. Even though I was, I felt pressured. Something of great importance was being laid on me. I looked at him - no wrinkles. The fact that Martin never made room for the Everettian multiverse delighted me abundantly. Eventually, I began seeing Data's potential for relevance. Impulsive gesturing, mind without hand, skilless crafting, visceral manifestation, randomization, automatism, readymades, unruliness, desecration, nightmarishness, abstraction, etc. all those chance-invoking and principles-breaking methods are now willingly invited in my studio.

After a while, my conversion started to show off. Before, Marcel’s unfinished work - “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors” (which by getting accidentally broken during transportation made the artist to declare it finished) - for me was a good-for-nothing object. I could only regard it as an object in an advanced state of disintegration. But one day, when a lovely stained glass panel of mine felt flat on the concrete slab of my studio, shattering its upper half beyond repair, I remembered his wisdom and thanked him. Because of him, I could now think of metamorphosing it into something else, in which the broken part isn’t an undesirable accident anymore, but a commendable constitutive part of the process and a part of its own biography.

Furthermore, my attitude changed towards Jason Pollock’s impulse driven, splash-drip paintings. Before, I wasn’t thinking highly of it, no matter how large the canvas was. But as it happens, one day I found a two decades old drawing of mine, which I’ve done by letting my hand to spasmodically scribble incoherent curves on a piece of paper. I just did it that way, I don’t know why. Then watching it from different angles, my neurons identified patterns resembling human and animal figures, to which I added shades and details. The surprise came the next day, when I presented it to my colleagues and each of them recognized themselves and the others, in the exact same correlation. I made a couple more of those drawings, but I didn’t know what to make out of this method, so they went into my drawer and stayed hidden, until recently. I yet still have to employ the method in my artwork, but I’m open to trying it and letting the subject to come up by itself.

I am contaminated. Truth is, I’ve been contaminated long before I realized, as it seems by looking at some old poems that I wrote a decade earlier. I remembered vividly writing them in vengeance to the messages I was receiving from back home, from my good, old friends. After several years of relocation to Canada, some of them started sounding nonsensical to me. I responded confusedly with ambiguous messages. Although not as radical as the incomprehensible "simultaneous poems ", it turns out that my poems were Dada-like in their incomprehensibility, nevertheless. As my archetypes were falling apart in my emigration experience, I was more and more convinced that it was them spelling gibberish. Maybe it was me, though, the observer.

***
So, yes, I’m inexorably welcoming the movement’s power. In the midst of it, however, I recoil involuntarily wondering whether the new stories equate to truth - the last bastion. One more: intuition is the beginning of investigation, not the end of it. “Shake me up, Tristan! Pull the nonsense out of me and go frame it. Quit my commonsense, leave me with myself. I’ll be forever afresh, at least.”

A century after Samuel Rosenstock and his determined colleagues was prophesying Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, my residual engineeristic view of the world finally dies down. A movement born against the war’s atrocities, the movement against all movements, and the atomizer of the arts, must be worth something.

“Of course it does. In your dreams”, said Salvador Dali with a theatrical crescendo emphasis. I didn’t argue. He knew I knew he was teasing me. What bothered me was the founder’s pseudonym, Tristan Tzara, which in Romanian meant “Sorrow Country”. Not our country, I was hoping letting a patriotic vibe running down my spine. When I asked him if he really meant that, he looked straight into my eyes and said: “Da-da!”. "Oh, don't give me-yes!", I replied, smiling. In Romanian, a single "da" means "yes"; two "da's", spoken with irony, means either a reproachful "da", or a sarcastic "yeas, sure", which means "no". I feared for the later. I politely invited him to sit down for a treat with a cube of Turkish delight and a glass of cold water. He made excuses for he was too preoccupied that night writing a brutal message for some friends of his who were waiting for him. I understood him. On the way out, he stopped and recited this, half turned towards me: “Supposing life to be a poor farce, without aim or initial parturition, […] we have proclaimed as the sole basis for agreement: art.”
I latched the door behind him. Later that day, I’ve got this last text message from him.
“Art yourself, my friend! You’re too kind. Art your life all the way! And art you, everyone!”

Catalin Domniteanu