BIOGRAPHY & MANIFEST
Cosmin Haiaș
TRACK A — ENGINEER
Automation Engineer
SINCE 1993
Trained in industrial automation and control systems — PLCs, sensors, signal processing, kinetic mechanics. Decades of building systems that monitor, regulate, and respond gave Cosmin an engineer’s instinct: precision, feedback loops, deterministic outputs.
This technical foundation becomes raw material — Arduino boards, Peltier modules, solar cells, relay circuits, and water-jet cut polycarbonate enter the studio not as tools but as expressive vocabulary.
TRACK B — ARTIST
Visual Artist
PAINTING DEGREE — 2006
A second formation in painting — the slow accumulation of a critical eye, colour sensibility, and the conviction that art must interrogate the world, not merely decorate it. Studio practice rooted in contemporary art discourse and social critique.
The dual training is not a contradiction but a creative voltage: the engineer provides the how, the artist asks the why. Together they produce work that is technically rigorous and conceptually charged.
TIMELINE — KEY MOMENTS
MANIFEST
“Technology is the opposable thumb that will push us toward the next evolutionary leap.”
The work begins where the circuit meets the canvas. It combines information technology with the creative process to critique the moral values and derailments of contemporary society.
Every installation is an argument, engineered with precision, aimed with intent. Sensors record what we ignore. Sediment preserves what we discard. Salvaged voices speak what we silenced. The artist is an engineer of discomfort.
Materials are never neutral: polycarbonate cut by water jets, microchips embedded in river mud, shovels rendered useless, telephones resurrecting dictators. Each object carries the weight of its history and the voltage of its repurposing.
PHILOSOPHY
The Industrial-Porous Method
Porosity is both material and conceptual. Like the sediment that absorbs river water and industrial runoff simultaneously, the work absorbs contradictions: technology and nature, precision and decay, the engineered and the organic.
The industrial provides structure, steel frames, circuit boards, systematic processes. The porous provides permeability – allowing meaning to seep between disciplines, between the lab and the gallery, between the engineer’s data and the artist’s intuition.
PRACTICE
Transdisciplinary Process
Each project begins with a question that neither art nor engineering can answer alone. The research phase draws on scientific collaboration – environmental scientists, data analysts, historians – before entering the studio.
In the workshop, technical prototyping runs alongside material experimentation. Arduino sketches iterate next to resin tests. The final installation is always the product of convergence — where the data makes sense and the form makes meaning.
AFFILIATION 01
Grup Avanpost
Artist group committed to experimental and transdisciplinary practice in contemporary Romanian art. Collective exhibitions, interventions, and critical discourse.
AFFILIATION 02
U.A.P. Timișoara
Member of the Union of Visual Artists, Timișoara chapter — the professional body for practicing artists in Romania, supporting exhibitions, residencies, and cultural advocacy.
LOCATION
Timișoara, Romania
45.75°N 21.23°E — European Capital of Culture 2023. Studio and laboratory practice based in the city’s industrial-cultural corridor.
