Welcome to Sentivia

Okay, so, who am I? That's a good question, and honestly, it's something I think about a lot. Every presentation needs this slide, right? (laughs). It’s funny because trying to pin it all down into a neat summary is tough.

But here goes... The visual of the network is always really powerful to me, isn't it beautiful? The points, the lines, it's incredible to see. This network, this interconnectedness, is what I believe is crucial in my work. For me, it's been about media – about using different mediums to connect with people, with *you* out there.

And that’s the core of it, really. How can we connect to one another? And the way I've explored that has been quite, well, multifaceted. It's not a single path. I have a habit of taking odd ideas and running with them to see what happens.

For example, I’ve gotten people to dress up their vacuum cleaners. I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain why, it just made me giggle and got me thinking. I also put together “Earth Sandwich”, which was a wild project asking people to try and place two pieces of bread on opposite sides of the Earth at the exact same time. People started laying down bread in tribute to it, and eventually, a team managed to pull it off with bread in New Zealand and Spain. It's a funny visual. The video's online if you ever need to kill some time.

Another project, “YoungmeNowme,” asked people to find a photo of themselves as a child, and recreate it as adults. The photos that came back from it were amazing. Take James and Jennifer here, their photos side by side, they are poignant, right? Some were creepy, like the one I saw for Mother's day. I wish I could find the one I’m thinking of, there's a woman with a baby on her lap, then a photo of her son, 220lb and the woman is an old lady peaking over his shoulder. That project really made me rethink how we connect on an emotional level.

Then, something shifted in how I started to think about connecting people, and it came when I heard this audio recording that someone shared with me of a man, who called himself Ray, singing a song to his daughter. He had no idea what she was going through at work but felt he needed to offer some help, and came up with an interesting tune. Let me play some of it for you.

(*Plays recording of Ray*)

Yeah, so, his song was… intense and profound at the same time. It was so moving. This audio captured me; this, *this* is connecting. It showed me that at a distance you can realize that someone is feeling something, want to affect them, and use media to do it. This is exactly what I wanted to do: Create that kind of impact.

First thing was we had to thank him. His voice was great, it was in the key of B flat. So, I asked my audience to remix it, and hundreds of remixes came back. And then there was Goose’s remix – Goose is incredible (*plays Goose remix*). I thought that was amazing. After that the song ended up at a baseball game in Kansas City. It was even one of the top downloads across music streaming platforms, I was stunned! Then I thought why don’t we put it on an album? So my audience designed an album cover and I said I was going to deliver it to Ray, if they could figure out who he was. All I had was a first name, that song, and that his daughter was stressed at her job.

Well, in two weeks, the audience managed to find him. He emailed me saying, “Hi, I’m Ray. I heard you were looking for me.” It’s been a crazy two weeks, let me tell you. So, I flew to St. Louis and met him, and it turned out he was also a preacher, among other things.

But this whole experience really got me thinking. It’s sort of like this sign I saw in Amsterdam on every street corner. You’ve probably seen it. It’s a metaphor for me for the virtual world. Here we have this guy looking at the button, really focused, but not really that concerned about crossing the street. So many of us are doing that, all of us walking around glued to our cell phones. We could dismiss this as some sort of cultural problem, but honestly, life is happening *there*, too. When someone smiles, or when someone cries in a public place that moment is real and it's happening on that network.

We’re all looking to connect with each other, and to feel and be felt; That’s what it’s all about. It's a fundamental force. We can build things to make that easier, but ultimately, it is about connecting with another person, whether physically or virtually. So, I think those of us who build the technology need to figure out how to be better at facilitating these connections.

So, over the last few years, I've tried to figure out how to do that. I have been inspired to design ways to facilitate connection in my work. Sometimes, it’s the simplest things. “A Childhood Walk” asked people to recall walks they took as children, that were somewhat meaningless, but that they took often, and then to recreate them on Google Streetview. People were recalling all kinds of things they didn’t know they’d forgotten.

Then came “Pain Pack,” a hotline where people could leave messages about the pain they carry. I turned the voicemails into MP3’s, and gave those to sound editors to use and then onto DJs to create music, it was intense. The most recent project I want to share with you is “From 52 to 48 with love” it was meant to be around the time of the last election cycle, where Obama and McCain were talking about reconciliation, so I wanted to explore what that could look like, but it turned into a source of awful hate mail for me, which is where my origami project Angrigami came from, which was about turning hate into beauty.

And finally, I want to share “Songs You Already Know”, which was to find ways to address emotions with group projects. One of them was about writing a song for a guy’s daughter who was scared at night. And then there was Laura who wrote to me about her anxiety, so I sent out a call for participation to sing a few lines, which then got me a chorus from people all over the world.

And that's me, in a nutshell, I guess, It's all about this network of connections, the joy, the pain, the weirdness, and the beauty of it all, and figuring out how to make these virtual spaces more human.