Bilderbuch für Ernst Will is an electronic rendering of a form of proto-televisual iconomania: the creation of haphazardly sourced private pictorial scrap books or bilderbiicher. Often intended for the surprise, delight and edification of grandchildren by grandparents, these books had the anagogical potential to become flamboyant transmogrifications of the detritus and sequestered oddments of the great age of print in the latter half of the 19th century.

Often the composition of a book might be re-entered at a later date by another hand with the inclusion of parachronic imagery. This type of pre-literate/post-verbal, and often intrapersonal, animus could lead to the creation of visual tropes of astonishing clarity. Such tropes beg the question of intention in the creation of 'meaning' and suggest the unravelling of a kind of rebus or enigmatic code which reveals the extremely private within the use of the plethora of mass-produced public images of distant scenes, events and people. The fortuitous collocation of views of towns, voyages of exploration, catastrophes, battle scenes and royal portraits become mantic in the deft hands of an expert snipper such as Hans Christian Andersen or the unknown creator of Ernst Will's picture book in war-time Vienna.» (Peter Callas)