Conceived as an independent yet closely coordinated sub-division of REASArch, the Laboratory for Spatial Practice and Experimental Cinematics (L-SPEC) is a new initiative currently under development. Its purpose shall be to foster aesthetically inflected, inter- and anti-disciplinary investigations of space, place, landscape, and everyday life, taken together as generative elements of a dynamic knowledge system. As such, L-SPEC shall respond to concerns at once philosophical, heuristic, and mnemonic in nature.

Specifically, projects elaborated within the parameters of L-SPEC will seek to comprehend, visualize, and submit to philosophical speculation and aesthetic critique the mutual derterminations of (1) post-historical and post-memorial visual culture; (2) sub-, super-, infra-, and hyper-ordinary spatial experience; (3) the proliferation–and potential exhaustion–of the moving image as a mode of knowledge; and (4) cinematicity broadly construed, that is, in its relation and opposition to reigning ecologies of media and memory.

L-SPEC will generate work that is both “cinematic” by design (in the most capacious sense of the term) and (an-)archaeological in its method of engagement with the vast archive of visual-material objects that permeate and inflect the spatial dimensions of our quotidian existence.