daniel de wit

“When we leave here tonight and take our trees home, I hope that we can see them as a reflection of ourselves…if we live in a clean environment, absorb the right nutrients, get enough sunshine, and remember to stay hydrated, we, too, can become powerful agents of change.”

On September 20th, during the Global Climate Strike, I emceed the local Asheville rally, collaborating with internal Climate Reality Project team members and outside groups to showcase Asheville’s wide range of organizations and nonprofits. I created promotional materials including flyers, social media posts, and animated video. In addition to introducing six guest speakers and twenty organization representatives, I wrote opening and closing speeches. I used an acrylic sign made by a locally owned print shop and recycled construction dumpster wood to assemble a stage and display, and I organized an off-the-grid battery powered sound system for the public addresses and musical performance. I also spent the summer cultivating 100 maple tree saplings to use as an event giveaway; initiating a carbon offset and providing a positive symbol for a dark and distressing topic like climate change. Each tree is estimated to sequester 400 pounds of carbon during its first 20 years of growth, and rally attendees had their pictures taken with an infographic poster showing that concept. Later, the stage wood was re-re-purposed to build raised beds for a nonprofit featured at the event.

COMPONENTS:

public speaking
speechwriting
public promotion
communications
organization
logistics
graphic design
audio engineering
carpentry
arborism

My apartment in North Asheville has no soil and very little available space. It is an excellent opportunity for Restriction Creativity, and I have made it a personal goal to maximize my agricultural-output-to-real-estate ratio. This first-hand knowledge has driven home the challenges of sustainable agricultural practices and has given me an incredible respect for professional farmers and agriculturalists. Every year I have tried to make my garden both more functional and more beautiful—two important enterprises in encouraging others to make their own. It is a very -grounding- experience working in this living medium, and its maintenance requires a lifestyle that prioritizes attention to detail, short/medium/long term planning, and dedication to care. I also feel that the nurturing of plants is a good exercise in expanding one’s ability to empathize with humans as well. Being able to extract knowledge of the health and well-being of a creature based on subtle outer signals and symptoms is an important ability to strengthen, and I value this lesson among all the others my garden continues to teach me.

COMPONENTS:

material re-purposing
carpentry and construction
rainwater collection and management
aquaculture systems
fertilizer use / soil design
compost management
organic pest control
companion planting
container design
plant growth cycle infrastructure

In the spring of 2019 I wanted to create an experimental passive aquaculture system for my garden. I have no exterior power, and any fish solutions I resarched likely wouldn’t work due to the animals’ oxygen demands and my inability to use powered bubblers or filtration. I received inspiration after noticing tadpoles in a ditch by a construction site where I was collecting dumpster wood. I had heard these frogs while waiting at a stoplight during the past few summers, but had never known where the sounds were coming from. I went home and looked up frog habitats and decided I could create a paludarium (a cross between a terrarium and an aquarium) as a substitute for an aquaculture system. The system is sloped downwards and has a drain tube and valve that I can use to fill up a flat-pack 6 gallon container. The nitrogen-enriched ammonia waste sinks to the bottom and is drained away to use as fertilizer for my garden plants; the tank is replenished with freshly oxygenated water from a rain barrel. I later added a solar-powered pump to circulate the water in the tank, which (combined with three aquatic plants), provided enough oxygen for roughly twenty small SouthEastern MosquitoFish, too. (The internet said that the tadpoles would eat the mosquito larvae, but the larvae were too large for this small frog species to consume. MosquitoFish, a species native to the SouthEast, eat mosquito larvae as their primary food source and are used for insect control in permaculture systems—they solved my problem quickly.) The tadpoles transformed in about 3-4 weeks, and I would release the tiny frogs into the wooded area surrounding a stream behind my apartment. The frogs, Copes Gray Tree Frogs, are a local species and are not considered endangered or threatened. However, amphibians are in decline nationally and globally due to environment loss or pollution. Sadly this was true locally, too: a drought during the summer combined with construction waste and runoff to convert the environment into an anaerobic sludge, with red algae growth and oil slicks on the surface. Return trips showed little signs of life, and a dumpster currently sits where the tadpoles once swam. Amphibians are indicators of ecological health: they are vulnerable to pollution because they absorb toxins through their skin. The presence or absence of frogs reinforces the fragile state of the natural world both far away and in our own backyard.

COMPONENTS:

biological research
water management
ecological maintenance
plumbing
engineering
fabrication
landscape design
field study

COMPONENTS:

music composition
sound design
narrative design
voiceover
multi-instrumental performance
recording engineering

APPLICATIONS:

ProTools
Adobe Premiere
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Illustrator
Propellerhead Reason

This series of illustrations is an attempt to personify the Pacific Trash Vortex through a series of portraits of phytoplankton and zooplankton (microscopic plants and animals). Plankton are the most basic food source for the entire marine ecosystem, and they live in the few meters of water closest to the surface. This zone is also where massive gyres of plastics and pollutants have accumulated, pushed by global current cycles. There is an area the size of the continental United States where plastic particles outnumber plankton by 6:1.

As fish and other marine animals eat these plankton they also ingest micro plastics in the process. The accumulated plastics trigger the creatures’ bodies to surround the indigestible material with fat cells, which are then consumed by larger and larger creatures. This accumulation of plastics moving up the food chain is called biomagnification, and should be concerning not just for the health of our oceans but for our own health as well.

The artificial substances in this series are represented by spheres (heavy metals or other pollutants) and by an abstraction of the chemical diagram for DDT (hexagonal carbon links and three chlorine atoms), which I chose due to its historical significance and lasting impacts.

The Instagram project Justexture began in 2012 in Brooklyn, NY. Surrounded by an artificial environment of layered urban development and material decay, I began collecting non-objective compositions formed through accidents of history. It has turned my entire life into a scavenger hunt, and there are over 1,000 photographs in the series. Justexture is an expansion of the Japanese idea of “wabi-sabi”, a form of design that celebrates the fragile and ephemeral nature of our world.