In imagining practices that seemed outlandish at the time, the jazz musician and critic Ted Gioia seems actually to have anticipated changes in artistic performance that brought about rapping (with poets improvising), VJ-ing (filmmakers), and visual music (painters).
If improvisation is the essential element in jazz, it may also be the most problematic. Perhaps the only way of appreciating its peculiarity is by imagining what twentieth-century art would be like if other art forms placed an equal emphasis on improvisation. Imagine T. S. Elliot giving nightly poetry readings at which, rather than reciting set pieces, he was expected to create impromptu poems—different ones each night, sometimes recited at a fast clip; imagine giving Hitchcock or Felini a handheld camera and asking them to film something—anything—at that very moment, without the benefits of script, crew, editing, or scoring; imagine Matisse or Dali giving nightly exhibitions of their skills—exhibitions at which paying audiences would watch them fill up canvas after canvas with paint, often with only two or three minutes devoted to each ‘masterpiece.’
Ted Gioia, The Imperfect Art, 1988
On reading the last of these, I thought this is precisely what Imager was designed to do; to enable artists to engage in these interactions with musicians, audiences, and one another.