In this volume, photographer Reiner Riedler photographs machines that save lives or improve patients' well-being--inventions such as dialysis machines, respirators and cardiac pacemakers at a hospital in Vienna. The work was initiated by the hospital stay of a close family member. The book was the winner of the La Fabrica Dummy Award 2015.

The book WILL - The Lifesaving Machines by Reiner Riedler, published in 2016, is dedicated to the theme of transience and the human quest for immortality. Over a period of four years, he photographed respirators, artificial hearts, dialysis machines, heart-lung machines, anaesthesia machines, pacemakers and prostheses, through to experimental apparatus and humanoid robots, but also teaching models, historical objects and simulation devices. 

Initially, he examined this topic in the context of their functioning, i.e. the interaction of these survival machines with people and their spatial environment. But for ethical reasons, the artist switched to the formal means of objective product photography. Completely detached from doctors, hospitals and human suffering, the artist thus creates space for his own fantasies about how the depicted apparatus and the human body fit together. Unlike in Riedler's earlier works, people are completely left out here. Nevertheless, the artist succeeds in creating a direct connection between machines and people. One almost gets the impression that the machines, with their lamps and tubes and parts of prostheses, are transformed into beings of themselves.

The title of the series WILL (the English word for: will, wish, last will) describes on the one hand man's endeavour to prolong his earthly life to the utmost with the help of medicine and technology, and yet it inevitably makes us painfully aware of our fragility and finiteness.