Rhizome - Live Spatial Ambient

​"Rhizome" is an ambient and field recording-based composition where environmental sounds dissolve into volume swells and electronic resonance. Developed through listening in grasslands across the Midwest and now within the Chihuahuan Desert, this 24-channel spatial audio experience at Reforesters Laboratory moves with the energies of these living landscapes. ​Like the underground stems of grasses—rhizomes that spread horizontally through soil, connecting and nourishing new growth—the composition extends through intertwining sonic pathways, branching, looping, and reemerging across channels. Just as the rhizome binds and holds the land, this work holds space and perception, grounding the listener in an auditory eco-hallucination. ​Through Deep Listening, Veronica shapes an evolving soundscape that blurs perception and presence. You are invited to listen with your whole being—eyes resting, heart attuned—as the sounds of grasslands and desert intertwine, moving around and through you. ​Veronica Anne Salinas is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, writer, and Deep Listener based between Chicago, IL and the Southwest (US). Her work in sound explores Deep Listening, acoustic ecology, soundwalks, multichannel audio, improvisation, text scores, field recording, writing, and performance. Her projects explore methods of attunement—to ecologies, to bodies, to memory, and to the unseen, noticing what often escapes attention: the slow, the quiet, the ephemeral. Her projects are drawn to edges—of environments, identities, systems—and to the poetic and political possibilities they hold. ​She has presented work at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, National Museum of Mexican Art, Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain, Tallgrass National Prairie Preserve, New Music Gathering, Experimental Sound Studio, Museum for Contemporary Art Chicago, Empty Bottle, New Media Art & Sound Summit, Omaha Under the Radar Festival, Nameless Sound, and many others. ​Veronica is currently the 2025 Land Management Fellow at the Chinati Foundation, a co-founder and artistic director of Tierras Sonidas//Sonic Rodeo, an annual gathering devoted to experimental sound, a producer at Campbient, and a board member of the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology. She studied Deep Listening at the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and holds an MFA in Sound Art & Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.