The Limits of Abstraction — Different tools. Shared questions. What makes us want to learn?

The Limits of Abstraction ### Different tools. Shared questions. What makes us want to learn?

Short description

One works with colour, gesture, and feeling. The other with signals, models, and experiments. Yet the further they move into abstraction, the closer their questions become.

Abstract expressionist painter Cserbik Rita and researcher Lévay György explore how radically different approaches can arrive at common ground — and what it takes to get there. Because abstraction is something we learn. And learning needs an emotional reason: curiosity, fascination, frustration, something we care enough about to keep going.

Pölö joins to prod, connect, and occasionally interrupt. Come with curiosity. You might leave recognising that your most rational thinking started with a feeling.

Full description

Give one person a brush. Give another a problem to model.

Their tools, habits, and ways of judging the result may look nothing alike. Follow their thinking far enough, though, and you may find them wrestling with the same questions.

What matters here? What can I leave out? What am I missing? And how on earth do I know when I’m done?

This Interferencia™ explores a proposition: at a certain level of abstraction, an emotional, artistic approach and a rational, research-driven approach can arrive at the same place — despite taking very different routes.

Cserbik Rita brings the perspective of abstract expressionist painting: colour, material, gesture, and the experience of something taking shape before it can be explained. Lévay György brings research into prosthetic control: how human intention becomes action through bodily signals, interpretation, and a responding machine.

Feeling and reasoning belong to both worlds. What differs is how each person works with them, which tools they use, and what counts as a convincing result.

Different routes. Familiar questions.

A painter may remove a recognisable form and find that the painting says more. A researcher may simplify a model and find that it explains more. Both must discover what can disappear without losing what matters.

That sounds neat. Perhaps suspiciously neat.

So we’ll ask for actual examples. What did they leave out? What went wrong? How did they recognise something worth keeping? Where do their methods genuinely meet — and where does the comparison stop working?

The brain and the body belong in this conversation, too. A painted mark changes the artist’s next gesture. A prosthesis’s response informs its user’s next attempt. Intention becomes action, the result comes back, and something is learned.

What does the hand contribute to that process? Must a painting be made by hand to feel like your work? Could another tool preserve the gesture, the choice, the emotional investment — while changing almost everything about the movement?

And here comes the possible aha.

Abstraction is something we have to learn. And learning needs something to matter to us.

Nobody arrives knowing which details are essential and which can fall away. We develop that ability through attention, experimentation, mistakes, and another attempt.

But why make another attempt?

A question gets under your skin. A colour won’t leave you alone. A result makes no sense, and you need to know why. Before there is a method, there may already be curiosity, fascination, irritation, or desire.

This is the connection we want to investigate: even the most rational tools can be put in motion by an emotional motivation to learn. The researcher and the painter may meet long before their ideas become abstract — in caring enough about something to pursue it.

We’ll ask Rita and György what drew them in, what they had to learn to see, and what kept them going when their tools weren’t giving them what they wanted.

Why spend an evening on this?

Because you also make choices about what matters, what to ignore, and when to stop — whether you paint, research, build, teach, or simply try to understand your own life.

Seeing how someone else learns to make those choices might help you recognise your own habits. You could discover a way of approaching a stubborn problem, notice a detail you routinely dismiss, or reconnect a thing you want to learn with the reason you care about it.

Pölö joins as a conversation partner, keeping the two perspectives in contact and inviting the room into the exchange. Expect concrete examples, a few interruptions, and questions that refuse to stay politely inside one discipline.

We’re looking for an aha-moment. We won’t manufacture one. A sharper question, an assumption worth revisiting, or a new reason to keep learning would also make the evening worthwhile.

What do you care about enough to learn to see differently?

For anyone who enjoys thinking, thinking together, and seeing things from another angle. No specialist vocabulary required. Curiosity will do.

INTERFERENCIA™
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