Michael Day
Michael Day is an artist who works with drawing, moving image, digital media, print, and sound. His recent work is informed by the persistence of meritocracy in the popular imagination, despite its ineffectiveness as an organising concept for the improvement of equity in society. After completing a doctoral study that focused on asymmetrical power dynamics in online settings, he began to develop an interest in his own autobiography and class background. This has led to the production of an ongoing body of work-in-progress that explores the architectural legacy of the area he grew up in, and in a critique of the widespread, insistent belief in meritocracy in the art world, set against the harsh reality of working conditions for many artists.
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.
