Immersive

Activating social instinct

In 2019, I lost my faith in words. I didn’t trust my words to convey my intended meaning, and I didn’t trust myself to understand what others were saying to me. I thought language was broken. Then I realized the deeper problem: language is an agreement built on shared reality, and that foundation was crumbling. If we no longer agreed on basic facts, how would we communicate? Cooperate? Survive? How would we repair our divided world?

In the first weeks of 2020, pre-pandemic, I was awarded seed money by Visions 2030 to explore the intersection of art, brain science, language and culture. I set out to solve the cooperation problem in a hyperpolarized world and began a series of conversations with cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Bor who introduced me to complex systems and cognitive linguist Dagmar Divjak, who showed me how language shapes perceived realities.

Art asks questions and sometimes those questions lead to unexpected discoveries. I came to this: maybe we need to stop talking. Take a page from nature. Just as flocks are more than a collection of birds, might human groups, under the right conditions, become something more than a collection of individual members? Might temporarily disabling speech allow us to activate something more fundamental: a pre-linguistic social instinct? Might the experience of emerging as a collective help us focus not on what divides us but rather on what connects us, our common humanity?

Using a breakthrough algorithm developed by Dan and co-authors Pedro Mediano and Fernando Rosas, we developed Synch.Live into a testable prototype and demonstrated that we could create the conditions for human emergence and measure it. Over the past five years, Synch.Live has evolved into a joyful, immersive experience of collective sensing, a novel experimental paradigm for research on human collective behavior, and a lever for social repair. A live experiment in synthetic social life, Synch.Live blurs the line between organic and artificial, performance and computation, art and experiment.

To date, we've played Synch.Live with 1,250+ people in New York, London, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, and Mallorca. In 2025, we premiered Synch.Live Immersive at AMAZE/Berlin and received the Human Human Machine Award for creating a work that "doesn't just include digital elements, but transforms how we use them to relate to each other."

To learn more about this project, my extraordinary collaborators, and the research Synch.Live has set into motion, visit the Synch.Live website.