Matter After the Screen :: Kreutzberger’s RAUHFASER and the Biophysical Logic of the Digital

RAUHFASER by Lilian Kreutzberger, curated by Benno Tempel, at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, 1 September 2025 to 1 March 2026.

The first step across the threshold of the Kröller-Müller Museum carries a subtle shift in gravity. The air acquires a different weight, as if thought begins to thicken around the body. Everyday perception remains at the door while the interior invites a slower, more porous form of attention. Inside RAUHFASER, walls, objects, and fixtures behave like entities that observe as much as they present.
Every surface appears to carry a latent charge, a capacity to hold and release images, memories, and signals.

A bench, a slab, a ceramic panel, a fragment of domestic architecture: each element belongs simultaneously to a familiar world and to a near-future environment shaped by digital logic.
The walls seem to pulse with a quiet internal rhythm. Ceramics appear ready to speak. Marble reveals itself as printed skin that stages a tension between depth and surface.
The visitor encounters an atmosphere of gentle vertigo, a sense that a second layer of reality rests directly on top of the first. A digital memory rests on matter and remains active in every encounter.

RAUHFASER reads as an exhibition and as a scenario. Kreutzberger composes an environment that treats material as a living syntax. Screens, LEDs, and interfaces share space with ceramics, plaster, and paper. Nothing behaves as a simple container. Every choice in scale, light, and texture contributes to an ecosystem where perception and interaction merge.
The experience positions the visitor inside a choreography of gestures, gazes, and micro-adjustments of distance. The space evolves into a relational field in which bodies and objects participate in the same ongoing process.

Kreutzberger’s work reveals a precise intelligence of material ambiguity. A ceramic panel emits light with the intensity of a compressed emotion.
A plaster surface performs marble and simultaneously stages its own artificiality.
A spatial installation tuned to the rhythm of EMDR sessions uses alternating lights and lateral stimuli to address the nervous system directly.
The exhibition affirms the idea that objects can host internal states, that surfaces can acquire a psychological tone, that space can cultivate a therapeutic or destabilizing charge through calibrated exposure.

Seen from this angle, RAUHFASER offers more than an experience of individual works. It functions as a script for environments in which the digital and the material share one continuous regime. The exhibition becomes a threshold through which broader questions emerge, questions that extend beyond the museum and into the fabric of daily life.

RAUHFASER provides a concrete starting point for a larger reflection on the relationship between digital images and physical matter.
The exhibition suggests that both domains operate inside a common biophysical field. Nothing exists in isolation from bodies, energy, and perception. A screen demands electricity, generates heat, occupies a finite volume, and engages the eye at specific distances. A ceramic tile carries temperature, weight, and a particular tactile vibration. Both rely on the nervous system to form meaning. Both inhabit an environment shaped by breath, heart rate, and attentional rhythms.

This shared dependence on bio­physical conditions transforms the status of the digital. The digital no longer appears as a separate realm of pure abstraction. It gains humidity, friction, latency, and weight. Every interface operates as a surface among other surfaces. Pixels illuminate a panel that expands and contracts with changes in temperature.
Data moves through cables that bend, age, and acquire dust. Cloud infrastructures rest in architectures built from concrete, steel, and mineral resources. The digital extends across a chain of material translations that anchor it in the same world as bodies and objects.

Kreutzberger’s environment resonates with this expanded understanding. Her surfaces behave as membranes. They register contact, proximity, and presence. Light appears within material as a form of internal memory. A plaster slab that imitates marble enacts a double operation. It affirms the authority of classical stone and simultaneously reveals a printed image as skin.
The hand and the eye enter a subtle tension.
Vision proposes one version of reality, touch proposes another.
This dissonance generates a productive kind of doubt, a space where perception becomes active rather than automatic.

The EMDR-like installation amplifies this insight. Alternating lights and directed visual cues engage the body through established therapeutic protocols. The work acknowledges that technology and nervous system share a common operational plane. Pulses of light travel through circuits and retinas with equal intensity. The line between interface and body softens into a dynamic zone of exchange.
Technology shapes emotional states, and emotional states shape the way technology appears in consciousness. The environment and the visitor participate in a loop that constantly rewrites both.

From this perspective, the idea of “screen” acquires a broader meaning. A screen no longer presents itself only as a rectangular device that occupies a fixed place on a desk or wall. A screen becomes any surface that mediates between energy, information, and perception. A ceramic panel that emits light registers as screen. A plaster relief that performs a photographic image registers as screen. Even a wall that carries a faint glow or a residual reflection joins this expanded family. The category of screen spreads across architecture, furniture, and urban infrastructure.
At the same time, matter enters the conceptual territory once reserved for the digital. Materials record, transmit, and transform information. They store traces of contact, ambient conditions, and repeated gestures.

Every scratch, discoloration, or deformation acts as a kind of data.

RAUHFASER foregrounds this condition by presenting surfaces that appear in a state of oscillation between stability and modulation. The visitor senses an underlying activity within matter, as if each piece continued to process experience long after fabrication.

This convergence between digital logic and material behavior generates philosophical consequences. If both domains share a bio­physical substrate, then both participate in a single ontology of presence. The old hierarchy that placed material reality on one side and digital simulation on the other begins to dissolve. Instead, a layered continuity emerges. Screens, objects, bodies, and environments contribute to the same network of signals, densities, and temporalities. Each element shapes and receives influence from the others through flows of energy, attention, and meaning.

Within this continuum, the human body plays a central role. Perception operates as the point at which digital structures and material structures intersect. Retinas translate light from LEDs and reflections from stone with equal commitment.
Skin registers temperature from a ceramic piece and heat from a device with the same sensory vocabulary.
The brain synchronizes patterns, anticipates sequences, and constructs narratives from both algorithmic behavior and physical contact. The body acts as the biophysical layer that integrates every register of experience.

RAUHFASER’s proposition extends into a broader cultural horizon. Cities already function as fields of hybrid surfaces. Billboards shift from printed images to responsive screens. Building facades host light-based communication. Domestic spaces integrate connected appliances, responsive atmospheres, and devices that track behavior.

In this context, Kreutzberger’s exhibition appears less as fiction and more as a lens that sharpens awareness. She gathers these tendencies in a concentrated environment where the digital-material continuum becomes visible, legible, and emotionally charged.

The philosophical question that follows acquires a practical tone. When every surface carries the capacity to display, store, or compute, how does perception evolve. When every object participates in systems of data collection and feedback, how does subjectivity position itself.
RAUHFASER does not propose a single answer. It creates a situation in which the visitor feels the intensity of this shift in the body. The mild vertigo, the sense of being observed by walls and objects, the attraction toward glowing ceramics and printed skins, all contribute to an awareness that the boundary between image and matter has already changed.

In this sense, the exhibition functions as a rehearsal for an emerging condition. The visitor practices a new kind of presence. Vision acts as touch. Movement through space resembles navigation through an interface. Attention operates as a resource that activates or quiets different regions of the environment. The museum becomes a prototype for a broader world in which digital structures and material infrastructures fully coincide.

RAUHFASER ultimately suggests a redefinition of reality as a whole.
Reality appears as a fabric that integrates signals, substances, and perceptions into a single biophysical field.
The digital resides inside this field as an intensification of certain capacities rather than as a separate universe. Matter acquires the ability to host images and processes with increasing sophistication.
The future that emerges from this understanding feels less like a rupture and more like an unfolding. A continuum already exists. The work of artists, curators, and institutions lies in making this continuum perceptible, thinkable, and open to critical reflection.