Dan DeGeest
Dan DeGeest is a creative technologist, multimedia artist, musician, and endlessly curious explorer.
His fascination with the convergence of art and technology began in the late 1980s with early Macintosh tools like Digital Darkroom and deepened further with XPLORA1, the groundbreaking interactive companion to Peter Gabriel’s Us.
These influences informed his early career developing video games for kids, including Barbie Magic Hair Styler for Mattel, A Bug’s Life for Pixar, and several Magic3D Coloring Book titles for Crayola while at EAI Interactive, where he also met artist and collaborator, Terran Boylan.
In 2009, he joined former EAI colleagues to take Workiva from startup to publicly traded, market leading SaaS company.
After a 23-year marriage catastrophically imploded, he left Workiva in 2020, just a month before the pandemic, and spent the next three years in a fully remote software development role, a period marked by deepening isolation and growing burnout.
Seeking renewal, he took a LEEP and attended the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, spending a month digging in the dirt on their organic farm and practicing meditation. Returning home with a new sense of direction, he quit his job and pursued a Master’s degree in Human Computer Interaction and an intentional return to creative technology.
He was selected as a Runway Student Ambassador in early 2025, accelerating his experimentation with emerging AI tools. Around this time, he reconnected with Terran, leading to weekly creative AI sessions and their first collaboration: a short AI film created over a single weekend for Runway GEN:48.
Peter Gabriel’s 50:50 Project was a natural next step, an opportunity to return to the artistic spark that began decades earlier with XPLORA1. Creating a video for “Digging in the Dirt” brings his story full circle, reconnecting him with the themes of healing, reinvention, and creative expression.
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ARTIST: Peter Gabriel
CREATOR: Dan DeGeest & Terran Boylan
SONG: Digging in the Dirt FROM Us
ARTIST: Peter Gabriel
CREATOR: Dan DeGeest & Terran Boylan
SONG: Digging in the Dirt FROM Us
Video info:
Digging in the Dirt from Us (1992) has been with me for more than three decades, beginning with my early adoption and obsession with XPLORA1. Decades later the song returned to me as my marriage collapsed, and now again in this 50:50.dev collaboration that evokes my memories of the original MTV-era video while reimagining the song through the exploratory, remix-oriented ethos of XPLORA1 and the creative vocabulary of evolving generative AI tools.
Naturally, Peter’s award-winning music video became an aesthetic jumping-off point, weaving fragments of stop motion and claymation into our own generative AI workflow and an innovative technique for creating continuous, single-shot tunnel sequences. Part homage, part interpretive remix, the result explores the ways our minds and emotions can run off the rails when experiencing and processing pain and loss.
Simultaneously literal and abstract, present and remembered, this “TunnelVision” journey elicits the experience of being caught in one’s own feedback loops, endlessly replaying painful memories, overthinking, spiraling through disbelief, anger, confusion, longing.
Through its shifting passageways, the piece mirrors the process of healing, moving layer by layer toward a place that feels more open, breathable, and alive.
-DD
Special Thanks
Rick Clifton
Paul Wang
Matthew Gordy
Rick Lozier
Belinda Arge
Britt Prater
Song info:
Digging in the Dirt is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album Us, released in September 1992.
Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Daniel Lanois and Peter Gabriel.
Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.