A generative AI music video created for Peter Gabriel's 50:50.dev platform, exploring themes of introspection, buried memories, and psychological excavation. This visual interpretation of "Digging in the Dirt" uses AI-generated imagery to create a surreal journey through underground tunnels, neural pathways, and symbolic landscapes.
- Generative AI
- AI Filmmaking
- Music Video
- Peter Gabriel
- Runway
- Krea
- Nano Banana
- Visual Storytelling
The 50:50 project represents Peter Gabriel's vision for more equitable relationships between music makers and visual creators. This initiative grew out of a competition around his album i/o and aims to acknowledge the joint creative role that musicians and visual artists play in content creation, particularly on platforms like YouTube.
"We want to explore ways to better reflect this joint creative endeavour, and hopefully provide a showcase platform for the best visual work."
— Peter Gabriel on the 50:50.dev mission
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, 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.
