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Your Audience Felt Something. Now You Can Read It.
Attendance tells you they came. Sentiko tells you what they left with, the same day, while it is still warm.
Sentiko is the only live evaluation tool purpose-built for cultural institutions. Complementary to what the field already uses, not a replacement. Even silence is a reading. Evaluation, not research.
Sentiko tells you what those who tapped said they left with, while it is still warm.
The audience scans, the institution sees the garden grow.
Stars measure satisfaction. The flower measures transformation. Every institution already counts the cold side, and Sentiko adds the human read, same day, in the room.
In 1948, in the long shadow of a war that had burned books, banned jazz, and branded modern art degenerate, the world wrote the arts into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 27: everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts. Seventy-eight years on, it is one of the only human rights with no mechanism to check whether it is actually being delivered. We declared that art belongs to everyone, and then never built the instrument to see whether it reached anyone. Sentiko is that instrument.
Generic Learning Outcomes, Culture Counts, and the Impact & Insight Toolkit have done the long work. Sentiko sits alongside them, with one signal it adds: structured affective response, in the room, while it is still warm.
Mazzucato argues that public value is created through collective, deliberative reasoning, not delivered by a single metric.
Sentiko contributes one input to that reasoning. It does not replace the conversation.
Documents the role of the arts in health, illness, and recovery, and calls for stronger evidence at population and audience scale.
Sentiko offers one audience-scale signal that sits alongside this evidence, not in its place.
In 2022, 150 UNESCO Member States affirmed culture as a global public good and called for stronger instruments to measure its impact on sustainable development.
Sentiko offers one audience-scale signal that sits alongside this evidence, not in its place.
Your Brain on Art draws on neuroaesthetics research to show how aesthetic experiences change the brain, and calls for rigorous, scalable instruments to capture those effects at audience scale.
Sentiko contributes one such instrument: a live affective signal, in the room, on the same day.
Twenty-five years ago, I started asking what art actually does to people. Museums wanted proof. Festivals wanted numbers. Policy makers wanted evidence. So we built the tool. And then we saw the truth. The person who needs it most is the one sitting in the seat.
Most of us have lost the habit of asking how we feel. We scroll. We react. We keep moving. Sentiko is a small protest against that, fifteen seconds at a time. It belongs to the institutions that fund culture. It belongs more to the human being they funded it for.
Elizabeth Markevitch, founder, Sentiko
The world got very good at measuring attention and never learned to measure emotion. For a hundred years we asked a room only one question: did they look? Clicks, views, dwell time, stars. Every one of them is a visual receipt. It proves time was spent. It says nothing about what that time was worth. Measuring a room by attendance is like measuring a meal by calories. A burger and a salad weigh the same on the spreadsheet. The counter tells you volume, never nourishment. Sentiko measures the nourishment: not how many came, but whether the work fed anyone.
These are not survey questions. They are the conditions any cultural moment has to meet to land, last, and travel. Sentiko reads all five, in the room, while it is still warm. Each one is a petal. Together they are the bloom.
The first visceral hit, before the thinking brain catches up.
The reaction that stops the scrolling thumb and pulls you into the room.
The lens moves. You see the thing differently, and you cannot unsee it.
You feel a tether to whoever made the shift. You feel seen.
You cannot keep a real shift to yourself. You pass it on, and passing it on is the proof.
The agencies that survey audiences measure too. They measure the why, with analysts, weeks after the room has emptied. Sentiko measures something else: the gut, live, in the seat, in the hand of the person who felt it. A survey asks you to explain yourself, to rate it and justify it, and that is slow, and it drags you out of the feeling and into your head. Sentiko asks one thing: what did you feel? A tap, not an essay. We are not claiming science. Art is gut before it is intellect, and Sentiko stays there on purpose. It is the first live instrument the audience uses on itself, in the moment, and that is exactly why anyone can.
The fair objection is that you cannot systematize feeling, that the moment you name it you flatten it. We think the opposite. Being moved usually feels like an accident, a stroke of luck you stumble into. The five petals give that accident a vocabulary, and a vocabulary makes it findable. An institution can stop waiting to be struck by lightning and start building the conditions for it on purpose. This is not a replacement for feeling. It is a map for finding it, and a garden anyone can learn to grow.
Try Sentiko after the next thing that moves you. Five seconds. A bloom you keep, and a clearer picture of who you are.
