Derrick Meadows × Dot Matrix | Design & Live Systems

[001] About

Systems synthesizer.

I push pixels from keyboard to screen—from the phone in your hand to the LED wall on the stage. When I’m at my desk, I build design systems, tools, and websites. On show days, I run graphics, playback, and media servers at live events.

I started in 2004 as a stagehand in the DC/Baltimore market, pulling feeder cable out of the mud after the Jay-Z and Linkin Park set at HFStival. Over the next ten years I climbed through lighting technician and climber-rigger roles to AV technician, freelancing across the Mid-Atlantic. From 2015 to 2025 I worked at DC venues with GLP and IATSE Local 22, mostly as a lead video technician. In 2022 I went full-time freelance in video engineering, design, and development, and by 2024 my own gigs had replaced union calls. Today’s gigs take me across the country, and to Canada every year, from my DC base. These days I can run every cue (video, audio, and lights) from a single media server operator’s seat.

GLP, the historic Black-owned company affiliated with Local 22, supplies the rigging, lighting, and production labor at DC venues. I was a direct hire at GLP, which put me on the Local 22 referral list. The work covered graphics, playback, and video switching, plus assisting with projection and LED wall builds. Playback systems integrate with a venue’s audio, and sound has always been part of my toolkit: cutting and playing audio and video cues, mixing for streams and recordings, and DJing for live audiences. It started with organizing open mics in high school, which led to a record store job and a first DJ residency by 2005.

Lately, Millumin and Resolume are my bread and butter: a dozen-plus Millumin shows a year and two annual Resolume shows, mostly for repeat clients. Disguise is next.

Show days reward carrying a spare. When a show needed another graphics source, I had my laptop on me and put it in line. And when an I/O patch failed mid-show, I had my own portable Resolume machine with me and was able to hot swap and recover screens within seconds. That shows why hot backups, already in line as a separate switcher source, are industry standard.

The design side started in high school, where my graphic design teacher, a professional motion graphics artist, taught me the basics, my drawing teachers there were Corcoran-affiliated, and I went on to study web design, typography, and digital media at the Corcoran College of Art & Design from 2002 to 2006. Since then I’ve designed for small business, nonprofit, corporate, and government clients, and I’m still at it.

I launched Dot Matrix, LLC in 2019 for creative direction, graphic design, and web development. The first video jobs came that same year, supplying crew for live events to a DC government media agency, and now I build tools for myself and for clients in TypeScript, React, and Next.js. When a presenter’s PowerPoint crashed on the last video cue, I examined it with Claude Code and found clips upscaled to 6K with Topaz AI for an HD LED wall, nine times the pixels the wall could show.

At a live event, I shape sound, image, and light for an audience in real time, with the wide-lens view of a rigger who has hammered truss pins 80 feet up. On the web, I build the systems that deliver the same signal (sound, image, and light) to any device. Design is the foundation of both, and the systems I engineer carry creative expression to screens at any scale.

Two practices, one operator.