SENSORING SOUND : MAPPING THE INVISIBLE 2019

Sensoring Sound: Mapping the Invisible is an evolving body of work that grows directly from long-term collaboration with Shipibo communities in Peru and their multidimensional sound healing practices.

It builds on extensive ambisonic recordings of Shipibo shamans singing Icaros in ceremony, plant bioelectrical recordings, and 3D scans of sacred plants and Amazonian jungle spaces, all made with the explicit permission of community leaders Miguel Lopez, Rono Lopez, Angela Sanchez Rios, Felipe Ochavano Rios and Felipe Segundo. Working with sound designer/composer Colin Watterson, neuroscientist of psychedelics and consciousness Chris Timmerman, analytical hypnotherapist Ann Hamilton and 3D artist Sam Roe, the project experiments with how AR, 3D sound and indigenous sound technologies might be woven into contemporary healing portals.

The work treats the “altered state” not as spectacle but as a carefully constructed perceptual architecture, where ambisonic Icaros, plant data sonification and 3D-scanned jungle forms are reconfigured into kaleidoscopic portals that invite trance-like, heart–brain coherent states. Viewers move through these portals as psycho-magical interfaces that reframe forest bathing, sound healing and Shipibo cosmologies inside an expanded, technologically mediated sensorium.

In its current online iteration, the room deconstructs elements of these portals into an exploratory environment of 3D models, video fragments and sound works, allowing visitors to navigate between macro jungle-scapes and intimate ceremonial spaces. Visitors are invited to float toward an image with a tree at its centre and pass through the purple sphere behind it, which functions as a teleport node into the next room of the Mozilla Hubs space at https://hubs.mozilla.com/asSBydv/bert-gilbert.