Nick Tobier Receives Project Grant

A&D Associate Professor Nick Tobier has been awarded a Harpo Foundation grant for the production and operation of a year-long public project in Detroit. The project, New Newsstand for New News is a mobile news kiosk – equal parts reading room, news bureau and beacon, that combines electronic and print production of micro-local cultural reporting in Detroit. The focus for the Harpo Foundation’s award criteria in 2010 is the dialectic between the non-locality of the digital world and the existential physicality of our everyday environment – how our sense of place is being drastically altered by web space, which brings geographically distant locations together to form a new kind of locality, yet what’s small, local, personal, political and natural informs our vision for a sustainable future; the search for place-bound identity persists. New Newsstand in collaboration with C.A.I.D., The Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, for the Harpo Foundation, reclaims the significance of the local while simultaneously placing itself within a global context, drawing upon local phenomena, activating social relationships and inspiring a community.