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.

“I’m against capital punishment; it’s a subject I feel very strongly about. I started thinking that maybe the reason I’m interested in this is because of my own murderous feelings. I was looking at the way I’d been behaving – sort of passive-aggressive – looking at the bastard in me that I hadn’t really acknowledged, and as I was writing, I was inter-weaving bits of myself.

It’s very safe for people to put murderous stuff on others. It’s one of the illusions of capital punishment; you think that these monsters carry all the badness and if you wipe them out you can sleep easily at night. But actually, they’re made out of the same stuff that we’re made of. We’re not so far away from behaving the same ways. I think it’s quite dangerous, this projection trait. It’s healthier to own the shitty stuff. In some religions, all the positive sides are acknowledged and none of the negatives are owned. If we’re to move on properly, they need to be owned.”

-pg