ARTIST: Peter Gabriel

CREATOR: Lee Beavington

SONG: i/o (Dark-Side Mix)FROM i/o

Video info:

“I Run like Water”

Water is a shapeshifter. This video moves in and out with the tide and rides along the veins of the Earth. As an ecologist, poet and philosopher, I bring these lenses to i/o’s theme of interconnection. Through the science of relationships, I follow the symbiotic threads from moon to water to mouth to cell to planet.

I titled this video “I Run like Water” after the i/o lyric. We begin on the shore. The intertidal is the zone of in-betweens, home to barnacle, anemone, and urchin. Like humans, each inputs and outputs in their own way. We evolved from the ocean and are born from water.

On the theme of in/out, my video moves in and out of the real world, of the river, and of the eyestalks of a banana slug. We move from the macroscopic to the microscopic, from planets to chloroplasts. Watch a cell become a city and sunlight dance with water.

In an ecological sense, everyone is reincarnated as earth, rivers, and trees. Life cycles and shapeshifts, and water is a frequent sculptor of the animate and inanimate. Our mortality helps us discern the illusion of separation. This video is a reminder that we are defined by, and utterly dependent upon, our relations with other life.

“I Run like Water” is a true collaboration of human, nature, and AI—or human and artificial nature. This video often blurs the line between the natural and artificial. When is the artist human, and when is it algorithm? The keen eye will also spot two blue moons, Jupiter’s Io, and even a hint of Peter’s famed flower mask. All the video footage is my own, mostly taken on SḴŦAḴ / Mayne Island, in rivers and shores throughout the Pacific Northwest, and in the Amazon.

This video starts and ends with sun glitter, which holds a fascination difficult to capture in words. These shimmers on the waves embody a vital link between sun and earth, water and light. A Buddhist nun once told me her vision of god: sunlight sparkling on the ocean. Each glitter, born from sunlight one million years old, holds the spark of life.

Song info:

i/o is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album i/o, released on 1 December 2023. This is the Dark-Side Mix, by Tchad Blake.

Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Peter Gabriel.

Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.

i/o means input / output. You see it on the back of a lot of electrical equipment and it just triggered some ideas about the stuff we put in and pull out of ourselves, in physical and non-physical ways. That was the starting point of this idea and then trying to talk about the interconnectedness of everything. The older I get, I probably don't get any smarter, but I have learned a few things and it makes a lot of sense to me that we are not these independent islands that we like to think we are, that we are part of a whole. If we can see ourselves as better connected, still messed up individuals, but as part of a whole, then maybe there's something to learn?

-pg