Nick Tobier has worked as a landscape architect, a designer for the NYC Department of Parks, and as project manager for Storefront for Art and Architecture. A native New Yorker, Nick Tobier is a participant-observer of street life and the social life of public places. These inherently layered scenarios are at the core of his work, and his practice reflects his belief in the power of social dynamism and the fundamental role of artist as catalyst and conduit in this relationship.



Harpo Foundation is pleased to support a new project by Nick Tobier in conjunction with Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit called New Newsstand for New News, a mobile kiosk that provides a local beacon with a global reach through workshops that provoke and disseminate local observations of the physical city through networked and on site publishing.

New Newsstand for New News can be pulled by bike, packed onto a city bus, or strapped onto a car. This unit combines the physical structure of a news kiosk with the production and networked distribution facilities of a content bureau with writing workshops, print and electronic publishing on site outside CAID�s two exhibit spaces, at Detroit Public Schools, on street corners, at laundromats.

The physical structure effectively creates a networked local news bureau at each stop, equal parts beacon, kiosk and editorial office. From this base, our artist-writer-educators partner with neighborhood schools in workshops where daily observations on the physical environment can be honed and refined into effective prose, compelling images and reports in dispatches from peer to peer, and from each new voice to each new reader.

Using a wi-fi wireless internet router and laptops in conjunction with open source software (blogs, wikis, ning, flickr), a hub for these observations�both to receive it and to transmit it�is created. This approach�building an active rather than a passive audience, enables the voices of inner city neighborhoods to be heard across town and across the world. (Source: Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit grant proposal)

For more information about the artist, visit here.