Imagine the first day of freshman year. More specifically, imagine your first time driving in to Ann Arbor. Remember that big sign that says, “Welcome to the University of Michigan?” Probably not, because there isn’t one. What the University does have as the distinguishing landmark between greater Ann Arbor and campus is a big empty parking lot that reads: “Red lot. Permit only.”

Now re-imagine that first day of freshman year. Imagine that the Michigan Marching Band practiced in that empty parking lot instead of Elbel Field. Imagine arriving on campus for the first time, nervous about a new roommate and college classes, your car packed with dorm accessories, when all of a sudden you hear a distant “Hail to the Victors” as a welcome to the visitors.

This is one of the visions of Nick Tobier, assistant professor in the School of Art & Design, who gave a lecture called “Interruptions for Everyday Life” last Thursday at the Penny Stamps Distinguished Visitors Series. Tobier played a short video of what this vision might look like. Marching down State Street waving a baton in white uniforms and feathered hats, Tobier gave the audience a glimpse into the whimsical and awakening power of the disruption of everyday life. As car horns blared at the line of marching musicians, laughter filled the crowded Michigan Theater auditorium.

Tobier’s venture into performance art began when he saw an elephant in the streets of New York while walking home from his job at a fish market (a job he said explained his social life at the time). It’s not a typical answer about artistic inspiration, but it has a lot to do with how Tobier makes art now.

“It was something unexpected. Something to make direct contact with and something to take a person out of their isolation,” Tobier said.

He later asked others to contribute personal experiences with this type of interruption. Perhaps it’s the researcher who plays harmonica on the Diag and makes the tired student stop and smile, or the Ghost and Pac Man chase in the fishbowl a few years ago that made everyone stop studying for a minute to laugh. Tobier takes the spark from these exchanges and recreates them as the pivotal part of his performances.

Tobier was not always a performance artist; he began his career as a wood sculptor. Making contraptions like a two-foot-by-six-foot wooden box that could operate as the world’s smallest apartment, complete with bed, workspace and storage space, Tobier soon gave up his wood sculpting studio, and made people, the city and even the world his new workspace.

“I’d walk through New York where I grew up, where I was living, and I’d see all these amazing things in the street and I’d open this big door with a padlock and I’d go inside my studio and I’d make wood things. Wood sculptures that had absolutely nothing to do with what I was walking through,” Tobier said in a Play Gallery video.

“What I realized at a certain point was that I had a studio life that was completely separate from the life around me.”

The first project that Tobier created to close the gap between his art and his life in the city was a portable bridge that he set up over the small ponds that formed around the sewers after a snow melt. Tobier took an active role, helping people cross the wooden structure and engaging them in conversation when they said such things as, “I’m so glad the city is finally doing something about this problem.”

Another project involved building a portable hot chocolate stand made out of a red patchwork canopy that produced a warm glow when people stepped inside. When Tobier showed a picture of a policeman leaning out of his window to get a hot chocolate, it is clear that his work is connecting all types of people by shaking them out of their routines.