Confluences (2025)
a mobile-app based site-specific soundwalk
Teri Rueb and Laurids Sonne

Download iOS or Android app:

The confluence of three rivers (Clear Creek, Piney Creek and Coal Creek) marks the location of the Ucross Foundation and the campus of its artist residency program in Ucross, Wyoming. Founded in 1981, Ucross has hosted over 2500 artists who work in a diversity of forms and genres from literary arts to dance, film, music composition, printmaking, painting and sound arts. The Ucross campus is a crossroads through which artists from all over the world have passed.

Ucross sits at the confluence of three creeks, yet it is also the confluence of so many times, people and processes. To spend multiple seasons here, allowing the textures and tempos of the land, water, and inhabitants to sink into the rhythm of one’s feet, one’s ears, one’s whole body, is a gift. This is the gift we were given and that we hope to share through this work that invites visitors to slow down, wander, look and listen to the land, people, and creatures of all kinds that make up the presence of this place.

Confluences is an emplaced sound experience blending the stories, sounds and seasons of Ucross in a layered composition that covers the main campus and selected ranchland of the residency program. Sounds play in response to one's movement as they walk the land with a mobile device (running a free downloadable app) while wearing headphones. Voices of the valley sit alongside artists in residence, the regional community, and the many caretakers of this place, all mingling with field recordings of the site taken in different seasons. Please be sure to wear headphones and charge up your device before heading out.

The gift of time and space is held in these High Plains. Walk slowly and enjoy.

Land Acknowledgment

Ucross Foundation acknowledges with respect that it is situated on the aboriginal land of several Indigenous communities, including the Cheyenne, Crow, and Lakota nations. Indigenous people continue to live in this area and practice their teachings and lifeways. Today, this region remains an important place for many Indigenous peoples. As a Wyoming institution, we recognize and respect this historical context and are working to build reciprocal relationships with the Native nations on whose lands we are situated. In partial fulfillment of that commitment, Ucross established a Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists in 2017 and a Fellowship for Native American Writers in 2020.

Project Credits

Software Developer
Cristobal Mendoza

Sound Engineering and
Additional Sound Design
Ernst Karel

Moving Images
Laurids Sonne

Colorist
Emett Casey

Chapbook Graphic Design
Rani Robison

Web Developer
Ian Hatcher

App Graphic Design
Siena Scarff Design

App Map Design
Kyle Bohnenstiehl

Sound Credits

All recordings made on location by Teri Rueb and Laurids Sonne with the following exceptions:

Ice floes on the Powder River recorded by Karlon Knudsen, placed along Coal Creek Road.

Bird sounds in Johansen Memorial Garden recorded at Ucross by the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Ethnobotany Archive featuring Linwood Tall Bull, Northern Cheyenne, placed around the lawn at The Park at Ucross: Ahtove.org

Acknowledgments

Confluences was commissioned by the Ucross Foundation with additional support from Jesse Marion. Additional funding was provided by the University of Colorado Boulder (Research & Innovation Office and the Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media).

Special Thanks

We would like to especially thank the staff and Board of Trustees of Ucross who supported us so kindly with their time and resources from the inception of this project, especially Sharon Dynak, William Belcher, Caitlin Addelsperger and Jesse Marion. We are especially indebted to Tracey Kikut, Tawni Shuler and Carl Largent. Dorie McCullough Lawson and T. Allen Lawson generously provided housing in the final weeks of the project, for which we are very grateful. Finally, enormous gratitude to the Ucross artists in residence; the residents of Ucross, Clearmont, and Arvada; and the many people living at the confluence of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains—all of whom generously shared their worlds with us.

In Memory of Kel Harris
Horticulture Manager, Ucross Foundation