Techno titan Richie Hawtin has always been able to tweak existing ideas in a way that completely upends them. This time, it’s concert video. CLOSER is Hawtin’s app 10 years in the making. It’s an interactive audiovisual “experiment” that lets users deconstruct Hawtin’s creative process while performing. “Concert videos have been done,” Hawtin tells The Verge. “So part of my challenge is to have some transparency and give people a little bit of a connection or an idea of what I’m doing up there, and to understand that there’s a lot of things going on.”
Hawtin wants to push the idea of what a concert is, and inspire others to creatively use technology. Most people watching a DJ don’t know how the equipment works or can even see what’s going on. Gear is normally flat on a table, and actions that create drastic changes in sound don’t require flamboyant movements. Hawtin hopes that peering inside will let people get more insight to what is happening and give a greater sense of how much is going on at once. “DJing is more popular than ever before,” he says, “but there’s less of an understanding of what a DJ is than ever before.”