“We said no tech in the bedroom at night!” my mom shouts, snatching my phone from my hands and replacing it with a minimalist book, roughly the size of an iPad. On its plastic cover, the title shines: ‘~^-.3N3RGY_4NG3L.-^~.’ Frustrated yet curious, I pick up the object and bring it closer to my eyes. I am surprised by its weight: it is far heavier than it should be.

When I peer inside, 3D images unfold like a diorama, rising from the pages like a theatre stage. The pictures, almost larger than life, swallow me whole. Pulled into the image-portal like Alice into the rabbit hole, my gaze travels further and further, entering an ecosystem that reminds me of an archive of life. A collection of coincidences that are not mine, yet could just as easily be stored deep within my hard drive. Facemasks, aesthetic soaps, anonymous figures, and memes, all their life spilling out from the pages. Absorbed into the eternal stew of images, some I recognize and others I fear to conceptualize, I find myself in a world where the novelty of photons suddenly becomes familiar and ordinary as my iris catches their meaning, as if everything I see becomes the thing it is. I cleanse my eye and lick my finger to turn another page, hungry for more and hoping to step into the next chapter.

A white, all-glowing angel pops up and takes my hand, leading me further into the pictures, holding two of my fingers tightly as we descend into the abysses of meaning. There, a kingdom of caves and shiny creatures, some mystical and born from tales, now merges with reels and screenshots I myself could have saved yesterday. I turn another page. From time to time, images stop floating and merge back into one. In their compression, new landscapes emerge, claiming, through their staticness, a possible answer. The soft, docile fur emanating from the elements makes me want to caress the surface. I want to feel the edges of its limits; want to tickle the picture and see whether it will react, whether the landscape might shiver or breathe. But the angel takes my hand again, her fingers closing tightly around mine, and pulls me towards the next page. “No,” she says. “We shall move on!”

The world that uncovers itself before my eyes is chaotic and hallucinogenic, just like my usual feed. I indulge in the feast, and yet, for a few scenes, when the page turns around, there is nothing on its back, as if the illusion can only linger up close, as if this made-up world were just a standing postcard. Jumping from one stage to another, I recognize signs, clues, and pieces of text that, much like a riddle, seem to orient me towards a resolution.

“Can pictures speak?” I ask the angel. For a moment, everything seems to hold its breath. The images hover before us, silent but somehow expectant, as though waiting to be deciphered. The angel looks at me and smiles. “Yes,” she says. “And therefore, they can lie.”

Pressed, I’m about to turn another page, diving deeper into the book-tunnel, which appears to offer less and less light. But I stop, worried that the scroll might end.

“Is there a final page?” I murmur.

“There is no end to images,” the angel whispers. “I can only lead you deeper into them.”

In the morning, my mom opens my bedroom door, and I stir beneath the sheets, warm and heavy.

“Good morning, darling. How did you sleep?” _________________________________________________

Perhaps this is one of the many topographies Iris Hamers’s work inhabits: the excavation site of digital world-building, where an image culture that usually escapes or haunts us is given form, metabolized. Such visions do not simply ask to be seen; they demand to be entered, observed, and for the viewer to wander through their excess. Somewhere between archived intimacy and screenshot overload, they reveal the feed not as a flat surface but as a layered geological space: one in which pictures mutate and continue to live long after we have scrolled past them.

— Morgane Billiard