How the emotional garden works

Sentiko is a gentle way to log how art made you feel. You scan a QR code at a museum, a cinema, or a streaming platform, and you choose the emotion that stayed with you. It turns the feeling in the room into something a cultural institution can finally see.

Because the emotion is the point. We measure ticket sales and footfall, but those numbers say nothing about what actually happened inside you. When an institution understands how a programme made people feel in aggregate, it can programme better, fund better, and care better.

No. A review is a verdict, a star count, a comparison. Sentiko is a feeling, named and released. There is no ranking, no public comment, no thumbs up. You are not judging the art, you are noticing yourself.

TripAdvisor tells the next visitor whether to come. Sentiko tells the institution how the visit landed. One is a marketplace, the other is a mirror. We are not in the business of ranking culture, we are in the business of listening to it.

It is adjacent to mindfulness, but it is not a practice or a programme. Sentiko asks one small question, how did this make you feel, and trusts you to answer honestly. That single pause is often enough. You leave the artwork with yourself, not with your phone.

Yes, and the science now confirms what artists have always known. Slow looking lowers cortisol, lifts mood, and opens attention. Sentiko does not create that effect, the art does. We simply give you a way to notice it before it slips away.

Because it is the honest currency of culture. Funding bodies, museums, and cities keep asking what art is for, and the answer has always been how it makes us feel. When that feeling becomes visible in aggregate, culture can finally make its case in the language of value.

Yes. Sentiko is the Slow Art Movement made practical. Slow Art asks you to stay with one work long enough for something to happen. Sentiko gives you a way to mark what happened, quietly, without breaking the spell.

It joins the room. Your single emotion becomes part of an aggregate picture that the institution sees, never a profile of you. Think of it as lighting a small candle in a large cathedral. The light is shared, the hand that lit it is not.

Because a museum is not a warehouse, it is a conversation. Curators want to know if a room is landing, if a programme is reaching, if a quiet work is being overlooked. Your feeling is the other half of the dialogue they have been missing.

No. Therapy is a clinical practice with a trained practitioner. Sentiko is a cultural tool, closer to a journal than a treatment. That said, many people find that naming an emotion in front of an artwork is quietly restorative. The art does the work, we just hold the pen.

No. You do not need vocabulary, history, or taste. You need a feeling, and everyone has one. Sentiko was built precisely for the person who thinks they have nothing to say about art. You do. You always did.

Because a rating flattens what art does. A five-star Rothko and a five-star superhero film tell you nothing about what either one is for. An emotion tells you everything. Awe, grief, stillness, recognition, these are the categories that matter.

For anyone who has ever walked out of an exhibition moved and had nowhere to put it. For curators who want to know. For funders who need proof that culture does something. For everyone who suspects that art is not decoration but nourishment.

Because the attention economy has taught us to rate, swipe, and move on, and culture cannot survive that pace. We need a tool that slows the moment down and gives it back its weight. Sentiko is that tool. A small pause, on purpose.

No. There is no feed, no followers, no public profile. Your feeling is private to you and anonymous in the aggregate the institution sees. We built Sentiko precisely to be the opposite of a social network, a place where you are with the art, not with an audience.

Sentiko comes from sentire, to feel, and echoes ikono, the image. Together, to feel the image. The name is the whole proposition in four syllables. You stand in front of a work, and you let yourself feel it. That is the entire app.

Sentiko is built by ikono, a cultural technology company founded by Elizabeth Markevitch with 25 years of experience curating and distributing art across museums, streaming, and public spaces.

Scan the Sentiko QR code displayed near the artwork or exhibition entrance. Choose the feeling that matches your experience. That is it, no account, no download, no form.

Each QR code is tied to a specific venue, exhibition, or work. When you scan it, Sentiko opens instantly in your browser and shows you the emotion picker for that exact context.

No. Sentiko opens in your phone's browser the moment you scan the QR. If you want to keep it handy, you can add it to your home screen, but a download is never required.

Sentiko is a Progressive Web App, which means it runs in your browser and works like a native app without a store install. You can add it to your home screen in one tap if you want.

No account is required to log an emotion. Accounts exist only for visitors who want to keep a private garden of their own reactions over time.

Under five seconds. One scan, one tap on the emotion that fits, done.

Any modern phone with a browser. iPhone, Android, tablets, all work. No minimum OS version beyond what supports a standard web app.

Sentiko needs a connection to log a reaction so the venue receives the signal. The app shell loads quickly once cached, but scanning and logging require internet.

Sentiko is designed to be legible, high-contrast, and usable with screen readers. The emotion picker works by tap and by keyboard, and labels are localised in every supported language.

For now, Sentiko lives where the art is, in museums, cinemas, streaming platforms, and festivals. Each QR is tied to a programme partner, so your feeling lands in the right conversation. Home use may come later.

Yes. Sentiko is built in Europe, hosted in EU regions, and designed around GDPR principles of data minimisation and consent. No personal data is required to participate.

No. Sentiko does not use GPS or geolocation prompts. Context comes from the QR code you scan, not from tracking where your phone is.

Yes. If you do not create an account, nothing you log can be tied back to you. Venues only see aggregated emotional signals, never individuals.

Sentiko collects the emotion you select and the context of the scan, which venue, which work, which moment. It does not collect your name, your location, your contacts, or your browsing history.

You own your personal reactions. The venue owns the aggregate view of how its programme moved audiences. Sentiko is the infrastructure in between, not the owner of either.

No. Venues never see individual identities. They see how the programme made people feel in aggregate, which is the only view that matters for cultural programming.

No. Sentiko does not sell visitor data. Visitor reactions are not merchandise, they are a cultural signal shared back with the institution that hosted the experience.

Venues see aggregated emotional patterns across their programme, which works resonated, which rooms moved people, how audiences felt across a season. They never see individual visitors.

You see the emotion picker for the work in front of you, and if you have an account, a private garden of every reaction you have logged across venues over time.

You see aggregate patterns, not individual reactions. It feels like a mood of the room, not a comment section.

Each partner institution can share its own Sentiko picture, the emotions that moved through a show, a room, a screening. It is never a leaderboard, it is a portrait. Ask the museum, the cinema, or the platform, and they can show you what the room felt.

Cultural institutions sign on as Sentiko partners, receive a tenant subdomain and QR campaign kit, and deploy the codes next to works or at entry points. Setup is typically under two weeks.

Yes. Streaming partners embed Sentiko QR codes inside films and programmes so viewers can log how a piece made them feel from their couch.

Pricing is tiered by institution size and deployment scope. Contact the ikono team for a tailored proposal, partnerships start with a scoped pilot.

We think it is the honest version of it. Traditional audience research asks demographic questions and infers meaning. Sentiko asks the meaning directly. Culture is an emotional industry, and it is time we measured what we are actually in the business of making.