The best way to get your head around this performance/installation is to imagine a bizarre futuristic game of chess that creates music when the players move the pieces. 

  
The Reactable is a tangible electronic music synthesizer developed by a team of researchers and electronic musicians of the Music Technology Group at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.  Even synthesiser pioneer Bob Moog himself spent time with the team before his untimely death last year.
     
This multi-user audiovisual instrument, based on a tabletop interface, allows several simultaneous users or performers to share the control of the instrument by moving, rotating and caressing objects on a luminous tabletop surface (projected via a camera feed onto a big screen) allowing them to create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters, low frequency oscillators, modulators or grinders with associated visual iconography.  The resulting sonic nets, which are painted in permanent evolution, invite the participant to watch, listen, touch, create and play, and give an intuitive understanding of the instrument.
   
As part of Optronica Lab on Friday 16th March, there will be the live performance by Marcos Alonso and Martin Kaltenbrunner from the Reactable team. 

Reactable will also be installed in the Optronica Lounge on Saturday 17th March where the artists will invite people to have a play for themselves.