The work of Teo Spiller and Tadej Komavec is focused on exploring images through different processes of looking at them, which they simulate by means of their own technologies. X-lam is a different medium for watching images on which they began working together in 2005. While other media rapes us with images, X-lam appears as a discrete, light line. It shows us images only if we want (and know) them. It is a quiet rebellion against the satiation with images.
From the Renaissance on, painters sought to produce an illusion of three- dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas. On the contrary, X-lam reduces two-dimensional image to one dimension. The second spatial dimension is replaced by the time – known as the fourth dimension of time-space.
X-lam is an art object, a sophisticated home-made apparatus. It's a custom designed computer with its own operating system, screen 200 pixels in height and 1 pixel in width, with memory for 80 images and RS232 serial connection to terminal, which loads images and controls projections.
Eyes nerves are excitated no sooner than few moments after we see light in the dark. Spiller and Komavec use this natural disposition in their method of watching, called T.R.I.P. (Time Raptured Image Projection). T.R.I.P. is a method to project columns of a raster image fast, one after another, onto the posterior of the eye. As the view moves across X-lam, all the columns of the image unite for a moment into a picture.
Authors are exploring the possibilities of using X-lams in different contexts, so they use them in as many different connotations as possible, adapted to every single location and context, as for example: Inside Web Server was a multimedia installation, where they ask how it would feel to be a small part inside the web infrastructure. At exhibitions Territories, Identities, Nets, Slovene Art 1995-2005 in the Ljubljana Museum of Modern Art it showed a portrait of Igor Zabel, the curator who died just few days before the opening. Four X-lams created The Energy Wall on the art/techno evening at the Final Flash City 6.4+ festival, Izola/SI. On Alphabet City Topography at the 12th anniversary of Metelkova City, Autonomous Cultural Centre in Ljubljana/SI, X-lam connected the stories of 12 short performances, which several artists produced together with Posttheatre from Berlin/DE. In 2006 it was presented on Cec & CaC festival in New Delhi, India.
