Michael Day is an artist, researcher and lecturer based in Sheffield, UK. His art practice is focused on digital technologies and the potential implications of their increasing entanglement with all aspects of contemporary experience.
His practice is interdisciplinary and uses a range of media and technologies, including digital media, sound, installation, electronics and photography. His practice uses methods from both new media art and fine art, opening a conversation between the similar but often divergent approaches of these two related areas of art activity.
Previously based in Cardiff, South Wales, he has exhibited and screened work in venues across the UK and in Europe, Mexico and the USA. He has collaborated with performance artist and NESTA fellow Eddie Ladd on a number of occasions, most recently on the touring show Cof Y Corff, commissioned and premiered at the Linbury Theatre at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
His curatorial practice began with his participation in the Sheffield-based HAG (Host Artist’s Group), co-developing and producing HAG exhibitions and screening programmes for four years until February 2008. During this time, he worked on HAG projects including Host 4: Cinema, a screening and DVD of short video works, Host 6: Beauty, a print project for the Sheffield Pavilion 2007, premiered at the Venice Biennale and Documenta XII, and Host 8: Observatory for the Art Sheffield 08: Yes / No / Other Options* citywide event.
In 2014, he was awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Bursary to undertake Ph.D. study. His research is concerned with experiences of distractibility that are said to have emerged alongside the recent widespread adoption of digital communications technologies. Should compulsive engagement with digital media best be seen as ‘information overload’, or as a desirable retreat into enjoyable technological distraction? How might the way digital systems are understood—as data streams or cloud processes—impact on the way we attend to them, or how they algorithmically attend to us?
He is currently a fractional Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Staffordshire University.
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