Nicole Davis

This original image was made in response to findings about the toxic arsenic coloring that was commonly used for green dresses and wreaths. Although fascinating, I was drawn to this image because of the skeleton imagery and the part of the title “New Dance of Death” even before reading the article that includes the above image. I think the artwork already tells a compelling story, there is not an “issue” per se with the original cropping. However, I did really enjoy the image and wanted to try my hand at transforming it to tell enhance the story or tell a different story. Perhaps the simplest option for cropping would have been removing the surrounding text and calling it “A Dance With Death” or something similar. Or perhaps doing a tight crop near the faces with a title like “Face-to-Face with Death”.

However, I wanted a more dramatic change to the story being visually told. Another part of the image I was also drawn to was the way the ballgown wearing skeleton’s hands are clasped almost in prayer. In my mind, with this cropping we have a woman who has been left waiting, hoping, praying for something (or someone, if we take into the context of the original) for too long. Her idleness has has caused her to become death itself. (Hence the skeletal form).

While I do think the main cropping concept I used for this assignment is cropping to tell a new story, I have also (technically) simplified the background by removing the text on the edges, and I have changed the focal point and emotion of the image. The focus is now solely on the remaining skeleton, and removing the other skeleton makes this piece feel lonelier and desperate.

I love the aesthetics of space which is what initially drew me to the Leonid Meteor Shower over Niagara Falls, I knew I wanted to work with it in some way but was not sure what style of audio would best work for “enhancing” the image. Picking a “celestial” instrumental soundtrack seemed the obvious thing to do, but I wanted to push the idea a little further so I started searching for spoken word poetry relating to space. I stumbled upon Gas and Gravity by Hieron which uses acoustic guitar from martinsea, the voice of SackJo22, and the electric guitar and voice arrangement from 7OOP3D to help create their piece. I did have to drop the quality a bit on the audio to get the file size right for upload, but otherwise I made no additional changes to the audio besides pairing it with the image.

I believe that pairing this audio with this image emphasizes the idea of light found in both pieces, creating a story of sorts that the lights from this meteor shower over a hundred years ago can guide us today through space and through time. I think the music that accompanies the poetry also works to push the “story” forward, there is a sense of dread in some of the rhythms that I think speak to an idea of being pushed over a (metaphorical) waterfall (or otherwise into some precarious situation) while the voice assures us that the lights above will guide the audience to safety.

Through Space Through Time – The Meteors Shine by Nicole Davis is licensed under
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

I’m Nicole Davis and this is my final semester in the MSI program at FSU (and hopefully my last semester of school). Before this I was an English major, and you can likely already tell I have an over-fondness for parentheses. For some it’s the oxford comma, others the em dash, but you can pry parenthetical statements from my cold dead hands.

I am looking forward to this class (which I have already started affectionately calling “digital arts & crafts”) as a creative outlet for my last semester, at the very least compared to my other courses. I have some minor (mostly self-taught) experience with digital creative tools (for example, I had a media productions class in high school where we experimented with Premiere Pro video editing) but I am excited to refine and improve these skills (and new ones) over the course of the semester and looking for potential ways to apply these skills at work. Speaking of work…

Starting in December of last year (so very recently) I finally got a part-time job in a library. I work the reference desk at Tallahassee State College. That link should take you to the staff page for the library, where you can see a picture of me because I will not be including one of myself here (I prefer to keep as few pictures of myself on the internet as possible). I currently live in Perry, Florida (which if you’ve heard of it’s likely only because you’ve driven through it) but because of the new job I am actively looking to relocate to the Tallahassee area.

Now for the fun stuff, I love to collect hobbies, especially creative ones, such as painting, writing, photography, music and so on. For seven years in school I played clarinet, hence why I decided to allude to music in the title (honestly I just couldn’t think of anything better and “all that jazz” has been my recent default filler phrase). Technically speaking reading is my biggest hobby because I read almost everyday (but that is such a cliche hobby to talk about as an English major turned future librarian). So instead, none of that is what I am going to focus on here, rather I will mention my growing love and fascination with lost media. I’ve linked to the wiki “about us” page for lost media in case anyone is interested. As a busy college student I do not have much time to participate in searches for lost media myself, but I am always interested in learning more about how media goes missing, why, and most of all the often odd ways this media is found again. I think lost media searches are also fascinating because they encourage people to participate in archiving practices, and the growing popularity helps bring more attention to archival institutions like the Internet Archive and it’s Wayback Machine.