Ben Balcom

Growing Up Absurd is assembled from interviews conducted remotely with key members of the Tolstoy College community – Alex Van Oss, Peter Murphy, Chip Planck, and Paul Richmond – that speak to the ethos and history of the college, from its founding in 1969 to its dissolution in 1985. At once a sweeping portrayal of the college’s meeting places and the state of the campus today, Growing Up Absurd layers memories and traces of history to convey the lived experiences of its participants. College F, known colloquially as Tolstoy College, was an anarchist educational community which operated within the University at Buffalo between 1969 and 1985.

Filmed on the former grounds of Black Mountain College, LOOKING BACKWARD is a brief elegy to the legacy of a utopian college and other impossible projects.

Two slow pans across a public park in Milwaukee. Words from Bernadette Mayer imagining the possibility of a perfect summer day.

One sunny afternoon in the middle west, suspended in a time between, two commuters daydream of a life lived otherwise. Adapted from a letter written by Victor Berger in 1895.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

A feeling of forgetting rendered with first-person camera work, lens play, and image stabilization. I am old where I was born. It must have been magnificent once. The way it appears now is not how it used to be. It couldn’t be, otherwise this would be something else. Perhaps for a moment I am there again, but when I open my eyes I can’t remember anything. There is only this longing for someplace I've never been.

An affective portrait of place. An exploration of the city as abstraction.

Wandering through the body puzzling out a system of symbols. The trouble is, affect resists signification outright. The inside and outside become muddled when you start to feel your body in relation to the image.

Here are the playful recordings of a naturalist—the observations of a difficult object. As the studio accelerates and numerous cinematic strategies are employed, the information gathered becomes noise; all these measurements become doodles.

A mirrored discourse. The object we see is that which craves articulation, but is never said quite right. We are looking at speech from both sides of the mirror, listening...

Wandering through the city, wondering about the potentialities of space, wishing and wanting a full experience of the virtual. These thoughts are rooted to spaces on the outskirts that have been rendered without detail. Listen to the code. An indecipherable alphabet floods the brain. “Space” is really a bad metaphor for the Internet.

Prior to leaving Hampshire College in 1980, Tom was working on a 16mm film inspired by Jose Arguelles' book, The Transformative Vision: Reflections on the Nature and History of Human Expression. Shot in sync and MOS, the footage reflects Tom's interest in perception, human consciousness, and signaled his evolving interest in fusing non-fiction, experimental and dramatic genres. All the original materials for this unfinished film were stored at the LA home of Ken Levin, another Hampshire College alum who along with several other students, worked with Tom on this project, which he called the Architecture of Mountains.