Passengers: Solaris

Passengers :: Solaris by Riley Harmon :: Supported by FRFAF from STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on Vimeo.

Solaris was created by Riley Harmon as part of his “Passengers” series, in which the artist composites himself into scenes from mainstream Hollywood films – specifically, scenes involving car interiors. The works were created with a mixture of both 3D, captured HD video, and Hollywood film content, and use numerous video layers to create the illusion of the artist sitting inside the film.

Solaris represents a significant departure from the rest of the series – rather than inserting himself into a pre-existing scene, Riley instead constructed a wholly new scene from a combination of CGI elements (the car interior), a cinematic background (the forest scene from Bambi), and superimposed live-action film characters.

Solaris was supported by a microgrant from the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art @ the Frontier (FRFAF)— an endowment founded to encourage the creation of innovative artworks by the faculty, students and staff of Carnegie Mellon University. With this fund, the STUDIO seeks to develop a cache of groundbreaking projects created at CMU — works that can be described as “thinking at the edges” of the intersection of disciplines.

Riley Harmon is a graduate of the MFA program at Carnegie Mellon University.