The Feed Looks Back

The Feed Looks Back is a live performance built around the feeling of being almost, but not quite, seen: the texture of the contemporary feed made into a stage event. A musician plays. Claude Opus 4.7 listens once per phrase, reads the moment, and authors what should appear on screen: text that fades in, images that surface, live p5 sketches and SVG fragments, motion bound to amplitude and structural events in the music. Earnest, attentive, almost right. The gap between what the music is and what the screen returns is the piece. The default move when generative AI meets culturally specific material is to engineer the mistranslation away: fix it, hide it, retrain past it. I built a stage where it stays. The musician plays in a tradition outside what the model was optimized to recognize. Opus, given audio features, current scene state, and prose context about the musical world behind the performance, renders what should appear on screen with full attention. The result is sincere, sometimes beautiful, never quite at home: algorithmically personal, never quite for you. The system runs in two modes. Live Mode plays as the music plays. Python DSP extracts features, a Node runtime assembles each per-cycle prompt with the current scene state and recent decisions, Opus authors the next visual gesture, and the browser executes it. Presence, latency, and the visible risk of failing in front of an audience. Bake Mode is the offline composer. The same pipeline runs against a recorded track in three Opus passes. A composition pass takes the whole work as multimodal context, including spectrogram, DSP panels, per-cycle prose summaries, mood board, and reference photos, and writes a per-cycle visual score. An execution pass generates each cycle under that plan. A critique pass has Opus review its own work and rewrite the cycles that do not land. The refined score replays deterministically in sync with the audio. Composition, in the literal sense: thinking across time. What changes between modes is the temporal stance, Opus reaching live, or Opus composing across the whole piece.