Three Legged Chair is an EEG-driven interactive cinema installation in which a group of viewers collectively shape the outcome of a branching narrative through their real-time emotional responses. Set against Sri Lanka's complex sociopolitical landscape, the film explores contested histories, collective trauma, and the tension between personal and national identity by time-warping the story to real sequences from the civil war. Rather than presenting one authoritative version of these stories, the work asks audiences to navigate them together, and their brainwaves determine where the story goes next.

At each screening, viewers wear EEG headbands that measure brain activity in real time. The system reads emotional signals across the entire audience and aggregates them into a collective emotional state, which drives the film's branching logic, selecting which scene plays next. The result is shaped not by a director's fixed cut, but by the living emotional consensus of the room.

The framework behind Three Legged Chair is designed to be applied to any contested history, any wound that a society has not yet agreed on how to tell. Sri Lanka is a prototype. From post-conflict communities to political fractures that are still open, the project envisions a future where cinema becomes a space for collective reckoning—a scalable model for using audience emotion as a lens through which divided communities can confront, and perhaps reconcile, their shared pasts.

Three Legged Chair asks what it means for an audience, divided by experience, memory, and politics, to arrive at a shared story. And whether they ever truly can.