Virtualities: Virtues of an Expanded Socio-Creative World in Experimental Improvised Music Communities

Beth Coleman posits that we now live in the ‘X-reality’, a place which has demolished the divide between the virtual and the physical binary. This is the new contemporary landscape in which we build our
communities, document our lives, and develop our identities. Most recently, there has been an insurgence of contemporary improvised practices which heavily utilise the digital/physical hybrid realm as
a creative agent within art. By tracking the socio-creative processes emergent in the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra’s development of an international telematic orchestra, the case for a post-genre, post-
nationality and post-human reality of improvised music is presented. A practice which is exhibiting flourishing new approaches to improvised language and skillsets which this paper proposes can be used
to counter, critique, and re-think existing hegemonic narratives around technique, mastery and membership and present new possibilities for socio-creative communities. This is a paper investigating how
technology might help us, in the words of George Lewis, to “improvise tomorrow’s bodies”.