In Evanescent, shot on location on the beach at Byron Bay, Australia and also at Burleigh Heads Forest, Australia, Abriel has captured an intriguing array of anomalous, luminous phenomena that give every appearance of being manifestations of a parallel, living reality that exists cheek by jowl with us, albeit that most people, most of the time, remain perfectly oblivious to it.
But not Mark Abriel!
Using state-of-the-art, high-definition still and video cameras, Abriel has produced a unique chronicle of these bio-energetic lights that clearly react to human presence and activity, and yet, just as clearly, are in some wise separate from us.
Interestingly, the lights that Evansescent presents are similar to other anomalous lights that have been studied since the 1980s in the Hessdalen Valley of Norway. In a fascinating aside, Italian astrophysicist, Dr. Massimo Teodorani, a member of the scientific team studying the Hessdalen lights, suggests that the lights that Mark Abriel has captured on film in Australia may not be plasmas, or purely energetic phenomena, but may be actual, three dimensional objects.
This presents an interesting possibility: could it be that a sort of dimensional shift or melding is underway between the ostensibly “solid” 3-D world in which we live and the seemingly more insubstantial, light-filled realms of higher dimensions? That these little, flitting, lights that corkscrew through the air, zoom and loop around people's heads, flit through the rocks and underbrush, or hover enigmatically nearby, in the air or along the ground, that present themselves as marble-sized, opalescent little pearls of light, or as diaphanous, pastel-hued, geometrically regular, insect-like forms, or intensely yellow-white lights in mid-air, could be analogous to the fine stitches of delicate thread that sew two, disparate pieces of cloth together?
(Photo credit: Mark Abriel) |
Is that it? Is that what Mark Abriel is chronicling with his photography and videography?
I ask, because, serendipitously, I have seen similar lights, lights that resemble some of the ones Evanescent depicts, but in the rural Ecuadorian Amazon region, on the other side of the world. Moreover, the lights I have seen have been with the naked eye, moving at a very leisurely pace, just meandering around in my near vicinity, very bright, marble-sized, with an intense, yellow-white glow.
Abriel's documentary covers the period 2006 to 2014, whereas I observed the lights in the Ecuadorian Amazon multiple times in 2012.
Evanescent concludes, and I concur, that these lights are not insects or any other, known, biological, life form. And yet they exhibit very life-like, highly energetic behavior that clearly reacts to human presence and intention.
In a word, this is precisely the sort of thing we could plausibly expect were we to bump up against and to begin to integrate with another, luminous, dare we say, playful, and even inquisitive, dimension.
(Photo credit: Mark Abriel) |
Is the light penetrating into our world, or are we advancing, in spite of ourselves, into the light? There is so much darkness in the world – crime, war, environmental destruction, economic exploitation and more – and yet, in spite of all of that negative baggage, are we even now crossing over a subtle, inter-dimensional threshold into a hyper-dimensional congress with playful, bio-energetic life forms that are drawing us deeper into a sort of transformative symbiosis that will jointly define us as we penetrate more profoundly into an ongoing, so-far-unacknowledged and unrecognized (by the great mass of humanity) dimensional change?
I suspect so.
Evanescent is uniquely Mark Abriel's brainchild and creative expression. The beguiling soundtrack music, now Haydn, then Beethoven or sitar or guitar music, some of it performed by Abriel himself – the videography and photography, the natural settings on the beach and in the forest, the conversations with friends and technical and scientific personnel – all bears his distinctive visionary stamp.
And Evanescent is a visionary piece of art, in this sense: Mark Abriel has done what all inspired artists do – he has taken the seemingly ordinary elements of everyday life, visually distilled out the often overlooked, peripheral magic that surrounds us on every side, and slowed it down for our leisurely inspection.
He has disassembled seemingly ordinary visual facets of everyday reality, and then re-presented them in such a way as to reveal the remarkable reality that lies concealed within the ostensibly “ordinary” world in which we live and move, and which to this point has gone largely unremarked.
(Photo credit: Mark Abriel) |
This, then, is the central theme of Evanescent: we are interacting with another dimension, an energetic, luminous dimension that is all around.
Put a little differently, a dimensional, light-filled shift is upon us. Do we tightly shut our eyes against the magic of it all, or do we take it all in with amazement and wonder, and embrace the adventure on which we have already jointly embarked unawares?
Mark Abriel's Evanescent answers in the affirmative. It's all in.
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Evanescent is distributed by Boulder Creek International Films in London,
UK. For commercial media/broadcast opportunities please contact the Boulder Creek Sales Team for more information: sales@ bouldercreekinternational.com