Inner Witness: A Closed-Loop Neuroadaptive Audiovisual Installation

Inner Witness is a closed-loop neuroadaptive audiovisual installation and creative brain-computer interface that makes the otherwise fixed boundaries of a generative system perceptible by changing them while a viewer is inside it. It asks how a system that reinforces, opposes, or narrates a viewer’s affect redistributes agency and authorship among the viewer, generative system, and composer. A single viewer wearing a four-channel EEG headband sits before three screens of emotion-annotated film; measures derived from their EEG drive parameters across three music models: Lyria RealTime, Magenta RealTime 2, and RAVE. The music they hear is composed as they watch. Over one sitting, three undisclosed stances — Alignment, Adversarial and Composed — carry that viewer from contributing without knowing it, to steering the work deliberately, to having that steering resisted, and back to contributing without control.