About
Michael Lightborne is an artist, researcher and teacher based in Birmingham and Cork. He works with sound, moving images and text, and has exhibited in galleries and festivals in Ireland, the UK and internationally. His sound work has been featured on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Late Junction‘, BBC Radio 6, NTS Radio, ddr, Resonance FM, WFMU, Raidió na Gaeltachta, Lyric FM, Internet Public Radio, Radio Punctum amongst others. His most recent album Slí na F​í​rinne was released by The Department of Energy in 2022. Previous albums include RING ROAD RING and Sounds of the Projection Box on Gruenrekorder. His moving image work has been shown at Cork Film Festival, Glasgow Film Festival, Flatpack Film Festival Birmingham, Art Night Venezia, Bucharest Film Festival, Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival, Bogotá Experimental Film Festival, Eastside Projects Birmingham, Vivid Projects Birmingham, DivFuse London, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Herbert Gallery Coventry, UCL Urban Laboratory, Cinecity Melbourne, Coventry Biennial, Sluice Biennial, Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisbon and many more.
​
He is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick (as Michael Pigott), where he teaches and writes about film and video art, and the relationship between sound, environment and cinema. He is the author of Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2013), the forthcoming Wild Sound: Cinema and the Sonic Environment (Bloomsbury, 2024), as well as articles on the image of the sleeping body, the sonic environment of the projection box, experimental documentary practices, and the uses of projection outside of the cinema.
​
His work combines artistic practice with academic research, focussing on the development of trans-disciplinary methodologies using field recording, sound composition, filmmaking and projection, resulting in non-text outputs such as albums, films, video installations, and performances, alongside conventional journal articles and books. He was co-investigator on Sensing the City, a major UK Research Council funded project developing humanities-based methods for the investigation of urban space, producing a set of films and an album that were exhibited at Herbert Gallery Coventry. Before that he was co-investigator on The Projection Project, a major funded investigation of the history of cinematic and extra-cinematic projection in Britain. He is currently developing a project called Concrete Cinema, that uses experimental filmmaking and outdoor projection to explore the history and lived experience of Modernist and Brutalist architecture, and the future of concrete as a building material.
Michael’s work has been shown at:
Arquiteturas Film Festival, Lisbon
Arte Non Stop Festival, Buenos Aires
Art Festival at Hay
Art Night Venezia, Venice
Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham
Birmingham Open Media (BOM)
Bogotá Experimental Film Festival
Bucharest Short Film Festival
Cinecity, Melbourne
BFI Imax, London
City Arcadia, Coventry
Cork Film Festival
Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art
Eastside Projects, Birmingham
Flatpack Film Festival, Birmingham
Glasgow Film Festival
Herbert Gallery and Museum, Coventry
Luxury Goods Festival, London
North Portland Unknown Film Festival
Parachute Light Zero III International Short Film Festival, Paris
Sluice Art Fair, London
Sluice Biennial
Square Gallery, Bristol
Stryx, Birmingham
Trade Gallery, Nottingham
Vivid Projects, Birmingham
​