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(The exclusive festival story is emphasized in bold letters in the text below to stand out. The rest is a self questioning mystery story. It is also an open invitation for people and artists from all over the world to come to Resita and create.)

Jump to the Summary in Romanian

The motto of the story: Life is goal driven, from what is to what might be. (Mihai Nadin)

The motto of the festival: Resita will also be goal driven, from the derelict industry to the healing and miraculous power of art and life.

A Story of the Story

Usually Friday evenings, my elder boy, who is now 16 years old, goes out with his friends and colleagues from school. He is a good boy and he lets his mother know when he returns later than normal. She tells me too. I go to sleep early and also wake up during the night. Then, if I have new ideas, I write them down. However, on Fridays, I am also checking my boy's room to see if he is home.

So I wrote this story for my boy and for my (younger) brothers, who in my real life don't exist, this being one of my biggest regrets. Now I imagine we are just separated by life, and through a fortunate accident, we had the chance and joy to meet. And, as an elder brother, I wanted to teach them what can't be taught: life itself.

However, my hope is that they'll read even what I didn't write, and so they'll better discover themselves and equally the joy to meet one of their elder brothers. And "interacting with their mind, sensitivity and soul", they'll also notice I already met (some of) my elder brothers, who are and will be their brothers too. From now on till forever.

This story is about frugal innovation, but especially about Johannes Bettisch (born 1932, Timisoara – deceased 2014, Stuttgart), a German language writer, originating from Romania and a very special character in my life.

During the first years after World War II he was a colleague of my father in a technical school in Timisoara and they were friends. Later, he graduated a Russian class and studied many languages (German and Hungarian as mother tongues; Romanian as the official language; English, and even Chinese and Esperanto). He was a teacher and obtained a PhD in linguistics too. During his military stage he also got an airplane (sport) pilot license.

About The Vangelis’ Equation

Sometimes when I was working the night shift in the factory, I listened to Vangelis music on my headphones.

Once my professor said: “what about trying Vangelis with your machine tool?”. And, unexpectedly for him, I did it. He confessed later that he didn’t even imagine I was so “crazy” to take that seriously. I don’t know if at that time he wanted to provoke or to reprove me, or both.

So I went next to the machine and I listened there to Vangelis for the first time. I didn’t do it earlier because of my restraint towards those workers whom I respected. I have analyzed before, together with my professor, all the possible static equilibrium equations for that 5 axis milling device and nothing: it was vibrating only in some circumstances, apparently without obeying any laws. For sure, in those circumstances, something was happening that we didn’t capture in the mathematical model.

And the magnificent atmosphere induced by Vangelis suddenly brought me a vision: don’t you see or feel the tool wanting to free himself, to evade to the sky, to jump over the piece of metal? At that moment the problem was solved, it just required a huge amount of work. And I did it.

“You can’t imagine how effective your advice was, Vangelis the Greek helped me solve the problem: on one of the 5 axes there is a resistant force that, in some circumstances (the random and “unfortunate” distribution of the depth of the cut, correlated with the tool’s position) becomes a driving force and wants to blow up the German construction.”

“Be calm and modest, we are simple engineers, not geo politicians.”