Addison is an innovative audiovisual designer and creative director, shaping the future of entertainment through XR music experiences and cutting-edge visual storytelling. Drawing on a background in dance and choreography, he creates reactive lighting, kinetic environments, and interactive motion effects. Addison has designed LED wall visuals for major artists including Lil Baby, Ice Spice, Snoop Dogg, and Nickelback, and led concert experiences for Karol G and Sebastián Yatra. His work spans virtual production and lighting design for projects such as Amazon’s Fallout and HBO’s Westworld. He most recently directed the new music video for Daft Punk’s “Contact”.

Tell us about your role at Magnopus

I provide creative direction for audiovisual projects – ranging from traditional concerts to installations to interactive game experiences. I work with musicians to figure out how we can build worlds around their sound, mythos, fashion, influences, etc. I spend a lot of time tracing what makes an artist meaningful to their audience – why does the audience love this person or band so much – and using that to imbue these worlds with a heart and a soul.

What’s the most recent project you’ve worked on?

The last project I worked on was Daft Punk’s official music video for “Contact”! This was a total love letter to the band that got me into electronic music, and I’ve never been so excited to wake up every day and work on something. So many people who worked on this project hold a deep reverence for this band and this song, and I hope that passion is visible in the final video.

What made you decide to pursue a career in this field?

During the pandemic, I was working as a Pipeline Engineer – not doing much art or design at all – but in the background, I was discovering this really incredible music scene in VRChat. This is a totally grassroots community of people who teach themselves Unity, design virtual stages, and then throw raves for their friends. People show up with full motion capture suits to dance, people live-code music or visuals and inject them into the world – it’s truly cyberpunk and unapologetically queer (you can be whoever you want as a digital avatar).

I was very inspired by this scene and similarly started teaching myself shaders, lighting design, DMX, and stage design. After a lot of bothering coworkers with “hey, look at this virtual rave thing”, I transitioned out of engineering into design at Magnopus.

There’s moments at shows – virtual or physical, doesn’t matter – where everything that the performer, the stage designer, the lighting team, and the VJ are doing is hitting in perfect sync at the right time – and you get this instant where you appreciate how incredible it is to be alive in the moment, surrounded by these people, and then you just want to dance. I’ve been lucky enough to experience that feeling quite a few times in my life, and now all I want to do is pass that on and create those moments for other people.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt in your career?

I learned early on from a mentor that you have to constantly fight and advocate for yourself as an artist. I never shut up about how much I care about music and audiovisual art, and I don’t compromise on the principles that I care about.

I’m lucky enough now to have a lot of people at Magnopus on my side helping secure more music projects, but starting out in a competitive creative field, without my foot in the door, nobody was dropping opportunities in my lap. I’ve been pretty aggressive about making art that is meaningful to me, and then contacting people that I think it would resonate with, or putting meetings on people’s calendars explaining how my work could be useful to them.

On my first day as a pipeline engineering intern at Magnopus, with zero studio art experience, I sent our CEO a music video I had made in my free time. It definitely wasn’t any good… but I think that unrelenting, brazen sensibility of ‘let me make cool stuff with you’ has helped me get to a point where I can do art/design full-time now.

What, or who, inspires you?

I spend so much time studying and making visual media that I’ve inadvertently become more drawn to and affected by narratives and text-based media. I don’t cry that much when I’m watching movies, but I cry all the time when I’m reading.

I think the mechanical process of reading and staring at text, since it’s so minimal from a sensory standpoint – just black words on paper – can be even more immersive than visual media. You’re letting your brain fill in all the blanks rather than being told exactly what something looks like, and the way your brain fills in those blanks is often more personal than if you were passively watching something.

My favorite books are the ones with unconventional structures that utilize text as a medium and do things that wouldn’t be possible in film or television. Stuff like House of Leaves or ‘new weird’ authors like Jeff Vandermeer, where prose is shifting back and forth with poetry, and there’s this beautiful and incomprehensible world unfolding in the back of your mind, but really you’re just staring at a page. I love and seek out that feeling, and a lot of what I design is inspired by that kind of dream-like and amorphous imagery.

What’s your favourite thing to do when you’re not working?

Previously, my main creative outlet was dancing in and choreographing for megacrews in the SoCal collegiate hip hop scene. This community was highly intense and competitive. We would spend a lot of late nights ‘cleaning’, ensuring everyone’s arms were hitting the exact same angle at the same time. You’d have to be sharp and precise, and unified.

I loved these experiences and it was a great foundation, but in the last few years, as a side effect of attending a lot (...hundreds…) of warehouse techno shows, my relationship with dance and choreography has changed pretty significantly. Nowadays, I love to just hang out in the back of underground events with other dancers and just freestyle and flow for hours, completely unstructured. It’s very meditative – when you close your eyes and sink into the pocket of a groove and the stress leaves your mind and you’re just letting the music move you.

If you were on a game show, what would be your specialist subject?

Highly specific categorization of niche electronic music into subgenres. In my heart of hearts, I know that genres are arbitrary and musicians should create whatever they want to without thinking of boundaries or rule sets. Still, I find it incredibly satisfying to sort and identify music. And sometimes you learn that all of your favorite tracks fit into something called ‘hardgroove’ and then it’s suddenly a lot easier to find similar stuff.

What are you reading/listening to/watching right now?

I’m reading Labyrinths, which is a collection of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories and fables – most famously containing “The Library of Babel”. Another amazing example of utilizing text as a medium and conveying ideas that couldn’t be adapted to film.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Blawan, he’s an incredible industrial techno producer from the UK with very contorted, broken-sounding production. Sort of like if you take a classic breakbeat and then throw it into a meat grinder and then feed the result to a Lovecraftian monster, what would that sound like? (It would sound like Blawan.)

What’s your life motto/guiding principle you live your life by?
I think as a kid I instinctively gravitated towards all the things that I care about now – dance, music, film, reading, climbing – and then over the years I lost track of those things and got stuck shaping myself into something different – ‘be less queer’, ‘get a STEM job’, etc. Now I’ve been reclaiming and seeking out all of those things that I naturally cared about as a kid, and I’m much happier.

Tell us something that would surprise us!

When I retire, I want to be a park ranger.

Meet the Magnopians: Addison Herr