Arising during the depths of Naarm/Melbourne’s 262-day Covid-19 lockdown, Chatting is a structured ensemble improvisation - conducted entirely via Zoom-call. The piece highlights and interrogates the distinction between the disparate physical locations of each participant, and the communal virtual environment in which the collaborative work takes place. Usually, we focus on just one of these zones, apologising for any overlaps which may arise – be it leaving the room to take a call or else muting ourselves while we shut a noisy window. Chatting synthesises these spaces, inverting the “real” and the “virtual” and inviting participants to consider how sound, gesture and human interaction may be articulated in the abstracted world of online communication. This inversion operates on a number of levels. Most straightforwardly, participants by turns describe sonic events using words, and try to reconstitute these prompts vocally. The identification of real versus imaginary content is now problematised at both the ontological (Is a sound any less real when heard in a virtual space instead of in my physical environment? Does a sound lose its meaning when I don’t know who in the conversation verbalised it?) and semantic levels (What is the real interpretation of this prompt? Is it that which the chatter heard originally, or is it any way I real-ise it from the prompt?). At a more advanced stage, when Variation #3 is used, participants extend their sound-world beyond that of purely incident ambient noises. The prompts themselves can now be entirely imaginary, and their only “real” sonic constitution comes by means of the virtually-hosted performance. The various “images” of participants’ lived geographical spaces increasingly blend together, coalescing into a surreal and disjointed sensory experience which reflects the bizarre detachment of a life in lockdown, conducted entirely over screens. Chatting is an exploration of the affordances of a communal digital landscape which many have no choice but to inhabit. Whereas musicians typically resort video-calls only as a poor substitute for physical rehearsals, Chatting embraces and exploits the foibles which characterise the necessary technologies of our time.