Biography
William Crosby is a British/Greek-Cypriot artist, musician, pedagogue, and agitator based in Cambridge/London UK.
His practice finds its foundations in the environmental humanities, sound art, and radical pedagogies, working with field recordings, text scores, improvisation, writing, and communal sound-making to ask how sound can build knowledge with our more-than-human contexts, and how this knowledge can develop communal pedagogical tools fit for our age of climate crises. This work thinks about how sound enables embodied encounters with others, and how these stand as a radical act of co-working.
William is a member of MUD Collective, a sedimentology-sound research group, collaborating across Iraq, India, France, and the UK. Together, we explore thinking with, through, and about mud, in consideration of shifting ideas around human and more-than-human, organic and inorganic intra-actions, and towards a real geopolitics for today: geosphere-biosphere.
He is also a member of artist/researcher duo, (CWxWC), with Dr Cecilia Wee, who research how sound moves and operates within collaborative spaces of co-working and cooperation, and how we conjure the conditions under which critical, expansive, and respons-able listening can become embedded into everyday practices of coming together.
William is currently a PhD student within the Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) department, at London College of Communication: University of the Arts, London, under the supervision of Dr Mark Peter Wright and Prof Salomé Voegelin.
Additionally, William lectures at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, in sound/music studies, media & communications, film and fine art.
Selected Projects
July 2024 :: In The Field 2 Conference @ Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice, London College of Communication: University of the Arts, London
MUD Collective | from aggregate to silt: the sonicity and sodicity of mud (muddy workshop 2.0) (participatory workshop)
the latest in a series of ‘muddy workshops’, where participants explore entanglements with the earth via a wordless sonic encounter with mud. Through a provided array of vessels, implements, and soil sediments, participants will collaboratively use materials and bodies to produce sounding assemblages, concocting with the non-language utterances and frictions used in communication between humans–humans/humans–non-humans. In this workshop, we are reconsidering how mud, a geological recording device, may be encountered, and whether sound/sound potential can be released from assemblages through interconnections/interactions, rather than via technology.
April 2024 :: Unfolding Narratives 4 @ Well Gallery, London College of Communication
in our muddy bodies (paper prints, text, ceramic vessels, soil samples)
this work collects materials from recently facilitated “muddy workshops”, to challenge how participatory, embodied encounters can be documented after the fact as artwork, as a counter to traditional evidence-based conventions. Paper ground sheets and vessels hold muddy traces of participants; patterns—bodily prints—spillages—textures—mixtures. Here, their verticality invokes geological time, while a reflective text reinvigorates the physical traces, recalling sounding actions.
July 2023 :: London Conference in Critical Thought @ London Metropolitan University
part of the “Thinking-Feeling Desire in the Now: Post-Capitalist Desire and Practices of the Body” conference stream. Rather than concentrate on visions of a world in crisis, as painted by the mainstream media, how might we work together to reverse the stultifying effect of the image? Can we re-emerge into materiality, by exploring the in-betweenness of the body, mud and water through sound? The sonic dimension traverses (or annihilates) the space between mud and us. It enables a closer encounter with our own bodies, with other bodies and the body of the earth. In this immersion with sound we might find a collision of thoughts and bodies in flux to replace the insistent dogma of our human-centred narratives. We invite you to explore our deeply material entanglement with the earth via a wordless and sonically immersive encounter with mud. Through this event can we enter a more primal state? Experiencing and creating connections of co-emergence? Might this open out opportunities to merge with the earth? To affect and be affected? To move with mud and be moved?
April 2022 :: Wild Energies Conference, London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London
This three-day event presenting new and existing research and artistic responses to the work of Annea Lockwood. MUD Collective presented a lecture outlining the making of their film, from the recording process, the cross-continental collaborations, and the installation of the film, highlighting links to the work and practice of Annea Lockwood.
May 2021 :: online, via Parkhaus15, Florida and Window Room, Philadelphia
MUD Collective | Mesopotamian Mud: the third walk
A year ago we had planned a walk together through Cambridge to undertake a communal experience of the story of an enchanted pot from the Mesopotamian Marshlands. Due to take place two days before the first UK lockdown, it was inevitably cancelled, but this story reemerged as an audio walk. Recorded remotely, as if the pot had broken into fragments, we tried to communicate from a distance, via online platforms, in constantly changing circumstances. Something else evolved from the process . . .
November - December 2020 :: Dilston Grove, Southwark, London
among unexpected companions (field recordings & text scores)
shown as part of group exhibition, Cutting Together/Apart (curated by Irene Revell). In considering approaches to more-than-human kinship as a practice of noticing, sensing, and entering according to sound, this work details an autoethnographic survey of the wonky cycles between field recording, text scores, and improvisation. The text scores shown here are extracted from a larger collection, composed of three suites that broadly and imperfectly trace ideas of wayfinding, grief, and exchange.
August - September 2020 :: Galerie Meno parkas, Düsseldorf, Germany
surfacings ii — tracing every now (text scores & field recording) / surfacings iii — anything which comes forth (ground sounding improvisations)
exhibited as part of Modify (curated by Sandra Zanetti) | surfacings ii — considering bridges, in their many forms both physically and metaphorically, as transient spaces and points of cluster, this work is both a demonstration of, and invitation to contribute to, a counter-mapping and sounding of these dense non-places, through field recordings and a series of text scores / surfacings iii — this work-in-progress is a series of collective, simultaneous, but geographically distanced sounding improvisations, which explore the ways in which both individual and collective listening emerges from the imposition of distanced working during recent and ongoing global events.
Selected Performances & Collaborations
Aural Terrains @ Cafe Oto, London ::: OFFSHORE w/ Cally Spooner @ Stanley Picker Gallery, London ::: A Social Body Event w/ Cally Spooner @ Central Saint Martins, London ::: Opera Aperta w/ David Ryan @ Wimbledon College of the Arts Theatre, London; The British Institute of Florence; Resonance FM; Radiophrenia, Glasgow; Cambridge Festival of Ideas; Cambridge Festival; University of Greenwich, London; Athenaeum & Ocean Studios, Plymouth; St George the Martyr, London; The British School at Rome; Museum of Classical Archeology, Cambridge (supported by Arts Council England) ::: Bad Timing @ Quip & Curisity, Cambridge; SoundLab 103, Waterbeach ::: At Raucous Purposeful w/ Dominic Lash, Angharad Davies, Simon Payne @ Cafe Oto, London :::: The Trento Group @ Concorde 2, Brighton; IKLECTIK, London ::: Resonance Vessels w/ Sarah Strachan @ Dubrek Gallery, Derby ::: Murmurations w/ New Rhythms @ Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (supported by Tate, Paul Hamlyn Foundation)
Academic CV
2023-present :: PhD — sounding kinships: towards more-than-human pedagogies
University of the Arts, London (London College of Communication)
2019-2021 :: MA Sound Arts — Distinction
University of the Arts, London (London College of Communication)
2018 :: FHEA
Fellowship — Higher Education Academy
2017-2018 :: PG Cert: Teaching and Learning (Higher Education)
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
2012-2015 :: BA (Hons) Music — (Upper) First Class Honours
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge