Abstract Activities

Synopsis

Our film, “Abstract Activities,” is a flowing set of experimental and abstract visuals that challenge the viewers to place themselves and their experiences within the most elusive yet crucial level of creative consciousness, storehouse consciousness. This ground of consciousness, ālayavijñāna in Buddhism, carries traces of past actions stored as fertile seeds waiting to flower into future specified cognitive luminosities. This consciousness though is pure transition, it is flowing, morphing, and it is the utter unfettered capacity to bend, dissolve, and re-form. This is seen in the zany characters and geometric objects that squeeze, morph, transform, unite, and separate again to push our perceptions of what is possible in animation and imagination. Each abstract sequence reveals a different emotion or experience through movement and tone, as some subjects move in harmony, while others in chaotic frenzy. Though they are not grounded in a concretized realism, they evoke very real emotions of reflection, harmony, conflict, fear, calm, abandonment, brokenness, surrender, and joy. The beauty of abstract, non- linear narrative is how it takes the simplest of forms, sets them to sound, and lets pure undistilled emotion and movement overtake the audience. “Abstract Activities” and its community of visuals, much like storehouse consciousness, highlights the miscellaneous, nonsensical, fragmented, and elusive meaning of existence, from the beautiful to the strange and haunting. Together, the images display the inner cohesive ground where community truly forms—in the capacity for consciousness to become all things, to immerse itself in all of existence, to be universal in the most particular and unique ways.