An old improvisational semiotic practice is gesturing by hand. Hand gestures have often been regarded as spontaneous embodiments of psychic processes, and also as a primal and universal mode of human expression. The view not only characterizes some psychological and lay theories, but also schools of modern art, most explicitly Abstract Expressionism. This article is a study of hand gestures by an art historian discussing two Abstract Expressionist painters. It shows how an ideology of gestures and brushstrokes as spontaneous emotion-driven expressions is articulated by the expert’s hand gestures, but also shown to be a calculated effect of the images, a figuration. Following the analysis of the videotaped episode, the construal of gesture as primal and emotional is shown to match conservative ideologies seeking to suppress the alleged wildness of gesture. A review of the art-historian’s own improvisational, kinesthesia-driven gesture practices concludes the article.

This paper examines virtual reality gaming as a form of embodied interaction at the intersection of digital mediation, improvisation, and agency. In VR environments, players act through avatars, and their actions are shaped in real time by shifting relations among embodiment, disembodiment, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. The analysis brings together Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs, Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Harness Goodwin’s work on cooperation and multimodal interaction, and Alessandro Duranti’s account of improvisation. Focusing on Population: One and Richie’s Plank Experience, I argue that improvisation emerges through the unstable relation between the biophysical body and the digital body. Glitches, misalignments, and other breakdowns create moments in which participants must adjust ongoing action spontaneously, thereby destabilizing established physical and linguistic categories. These moments reveal a continuing process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization through which bodies, joint action, and agency are continuously reconfigured.

This special issue pursues a social semiotic study of improvisation. The approach considers the phenomenon both as a constitutive dimension of action and as a socially recognizable achievement. Contributions share a common focus on interaction, which is analyzed across multiple modalities including virtual reality, heavy machinery, paint and canvas, rock, theater, war, and the ethical relation between self and other.

This roundtable discussion convenes contributors to this special issue for reflections on the diversity of their research questions, approaches, and findings, as well as avenues for further inquiry. The discussion touches on several shared concerns, including the role of lexicalization in improvised forms becoming intelligible, enregistered, and reusable; how improvisational action might implicate action below the threshold of awareness; and more generally the relation between sign-processes and embodied action. In doing so, this roundtable discussion considers the importance of social semiotic analysis for understanding improvisation.

What does training look like such that one’s improvisation can be experienced as spontaneous? In this paper, I explore how the aesthetics of “freestyle” in street dance are constituted by empirically achieved bodily capacities contingent upon recognitions. Through examining the pedagogy of freestyle, I show how semiotic labor registers the apparent solipsism of freestyle in street dance into reflexive accounts of sensory-affective capacities selected for cultivation, scaffolded through the deployment of terms like “feeling” and “relation” within participation frameworks. I suggest that ethnographic approaches to the relationship between discursive and non-discursive dimensions of aesthetic-social practices, such as street dance, need to remain both affectively attuned to and semiotically informed, attending to how sensory-affective experiences are rendered discernible and enactable within intersubjective spaces. In addition to exploring these semiotic processes, I also gesture toward the evaluative dimensions of street dance through my fieldwork in a local community in the US and my participation in its transnational scene.

Improvisation is widely recognised as a musical creative activity, yet it remains infrequently used in classroom practice. This qualitative study examines how eight Dutch primary music teachers understand, implement, and evaluate improvisation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and field notes, two themes emerged: implementation, including commonly used improvisation activities, perceived effectiveness of improvisation activities, and feedback, and evaluation, including perceived benefits, challenges, and reflections for improvement. Findings show teachers value improvisation for fostering creativity and confidence but face considerable challenges, including managing classroom dynamics and limited pedagogical training, suggesting that teachers’ engagement with improvisation is shaped by both pedagogical beliefs and contextual constraints.

The text explores ‘Black Box Music,’ an artistic research experiment investigating human–technology relations in musical improvisation. The authors describe performances in which each musician plays an unfamiliar, complex, custom-built instrument designed by another team member. These ‘black box’ devices – ranging from AI-based systems to assemblages of analogue devices – cannot be fully understood or controlled, thus foregrounding questions of agency, sense-making, and aesthetic experience. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, phenomenology, and philosophies of technology, the authors show how performers, instruments, and audience form a dynamic network of actants whose roles and intentions remain ambiguous. Players initially struggle to ‘read’ the instruments’ behaviour, shifting from reactive analysis toward proactive improvisation. This process blurs embodiment and alterity: the instruments alternately function as transparent extensions of the body and as quasi-autonomous others. Such ambiguity invites anthropomorphisation and even ritualised interaction, echoing historical entanglements of music, magic, and spirituality. Audience members, too, encounter indeterminate agency and must negotiate aesthetic meaning without clear attribution of sound to human or machine. The project demonstrates how complexity and unpredictability destabilise traditional notions of control, revealing improvisation as collective, participatory sense-making and highlighting the emergent, co-creative agency of both humans and technological instruments.

This paper presents the theory of improvisational emergence, an account of how social phenomena emerge from improvisational processes. I build outward from the small-group improvisational encounter to provide an account of the relationship between individuals, groups, and societies. Social entities, including groups and societies, emerge from people engaged in group improvisation. But even though social entities emerge from individuals in interaction, their study cannot be reduced to the study of individuals, because once having emerged, social entities have causal power over individuals. The theory of improvisational emergence addresses the structure-agency relationship and the micro-macro debate in sociological theory. It moves beyond practice and structuration theories in positing an ontological separation between people and society. Improvisational emergence allows us to explain the relationship between the improvisational creativity of each participating individual and the collective improvisationality of the group. A complete understanding of social phenomena, including social structures, norms, and cultures, must be grounded in the theoretical and empirical study of creative improvisation.

This article explores the semiotic and embodied dynamics of improvisation by focusing on tactile interaction, risk, and the temporal conditions under which meaning must emerge. Drawing on ethnographic examples from competitive and free solo rock climbing, as well as greeting practices among Swahili women in Lamu (Kenya) and Toronto (Canada), I explore how improvisation operates not as a deviation from routinized behavior, but as a generative force. Through an examination of these disparate tactile encounters, I argue that under high-stakes temporal pressure, improvisation becomes a form of semiotic labor: an interpretive responsiveness to emergent signs that are not only felt in the moment but are also anticipated and evaluated against embodied memory. Rock surfaces and handshakes are treated as communicative environments that elicit the anticipation of qualia and require semiotic attunement when such anticipation fails. In such moments, I argue, improvisation does not simply fill a gap but constitutes a recalibration of meaning through the body.

This text explores how electronic musical instruments and electronic music ensembles can relate to composition and music notation by discussing the instruments in terms of existing practice in traditional instrumentation and in relation to symbolic electroacoustic music analysis. Starting from orchestration theory, the text considers how electronic musical instruments behave and are used, both with support from the author’s own practice and from a case study with students within the framework of a live-electronic ensemble course. The case study reflected the participants’ practice as creative composers/musicians, and how their exploratory and experimental approaches to their instruments proved important, creating challenges for notation. Traditionally, music notation relies on continuous changes of simple parameters, while performances with complex electronic instruments may have just as important information to document regarding their initial connectivity and parameter settings.