Peter Gabriel - Digging in the Dirt (Dan DeGeest and Terran Boylan video)

If you would be interested in creating a video using Peter Gabriel's music, then please visit the new website www.5050.dev to find out more.

Digging in the Dirt is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album Us, released in September 1992.
Listen / Buy: https://lnk.to/PG07

Video by Dan DeGeest and Terran Boylan

About the video:
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, spiralling 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

Creator biogs:
Dan DeGeest is a creative technologist, 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 the top-selling Barbie Magic Hair Styler for Mattel while at EAI Interactive, where he also met artist Terran Boylan.

In 2009, he joined former EAI colleagues to take Workiva from startup to market-leading SaaS company.

After a 23-year marriage ended, he left Workiva just a month before the pandemic and spent the next three years in a fully remote job, a period marked by isolation and growing burnout.

Seeking renewal, he attended the Esalen Institute in 2023, spending a month digging in the dirt on their organic farm and meditating. Upon return, he quit his tech job and pursued a Master’s degree in Human Computer Interaction and a return to creative technology.
He was selected as a Runway Student Ambassador in early 2025. Around the same time, he reconnected with Terran, which led to weekly creative AI sessions and their first collaboration: a short AI film submitted to 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.

YouTube:    / @dandegeest  
Instagram:   / dandegeest  
Online: https://dandegeest.github.io/

Terran Boylan is more interesting than you'll ever be.

Born in Omaha, Terran has lived on both coasts and has degrees in both engineering and art. He has two patents, created an award-winning college TV show, and created an animation system called the “Swiss Army knife of computer animation software” by a respected magazine. His films have grossed over $8 billion. He has presented at conferences, self-published ten books, has sung on stage, and saw Elvis live.

He once lost a major visual effects award to Ed Asner, who had appeared on his college TV show. He was deposed for days after a film project went bad. He designed and assembled thousands of action figures. He's had awkward encounters with Stan Lee, Steve Allen and Michael Nesmith. He holds an unpopular opinion of Tom Hanks.

After marrying and divorcing the same woman twice, he got it right the third time. Recently retired, he lives with his wife of nearly twenty years, along with their dog, near a lighthouse on California’s rugged coast.

YouTube:    / @terranboylan  
Instagram:   / subversiveplaythings