Unveiled and exhibited at the 2011 SPOT Festival in Aarhus, Denmark, Radartable flipped the conventional view of what to expect from a concert or musical experience on its head. Radartable is an interactive, audiovisual installation, a musical instrument, and a platform for creative and social interaction. It allows the audience to express itself musically, and collaborate to influence their concert experience, even if they have no ability to play music.

Musician and producer Henrik Munch composed the musical foundation that comes to life through the audience. By placing and interacting with tangible cubes on the table surface, the audience defines how the music sounds, and how it evolves. One set of cubes represents musical loops, which may be combined and layered, and offer full control of the volume levels of each element. Another set of cubes represents musical effects (reverb, delay, etc.), which are easily applied to the musical loops, to create some very complex expressions. This amount of freedom allows the audience to take the music in a direction the original composer never anticipated, in essence creating a whole new and unique piece of music.

Radartable is the second iteration of this table. It was designed and developed by CAVI, and exhibited at SPOT Festival 2011 in collaboration with Musikcáfeen. The first iteration, called DJ Station, was part of a research project and exhibition experiment that aimed to explore how young people, the so-called “Digital Natives”, use, consume, and interact with digital and social media.

Radartable has been presented at a number of occasions, of which the most important has been:

SPOT Festival Aarhus 2011
Screen Media Expo London 2012
Intel Workshop Science Museum London 2012
Infocom Las Vegas 2012
Multitouch Helsinki 2012
LEGO World Copenhagen 2012 and 2013
CHI konference Paris 2013
SPOT Interactive Aarhus 2013