A new music video released by singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel was created by a local college instructor.
Dr. Lee Beavington, an interdisciplinary instructor and learning strategist at Surrey's Kwantlen Polytechnic University, chose Gabriel’s song i/o for his successful submission, which he says resonates with his teaching
With a recent initiative called 50:50, former Genesis frontman Gabriel invited artists to produce visual work alongside his music, with any revenue generated from the videos split equally between him and the artists, notes a KPU release.
“The song i/o is short for input/output and it’s about the interconnection of life,” says Beavington, also a recipient of a 2025 West Coast Teaching Award. “My teaching and research at KPU as an ecologist is all about ecological interconnections and relationships, and not being apart from the natural world."
Titled I Run like Water after a lyric in the song, Beavington’s video is a compilation of nature footage he’s gathered over the years. This includes clips taken on SḴŦAḴ (Mayne Island), in rivers and shores throughout the Pacific Northwest and in Colombia’s Amazon Rainforest while teaching KPU’s Amazon Interdisciplinary Field School.
“We like to think we're separate and apart — this human exceptionalism idea — but this song points out that that's not the fact. We’re actually directly connected with and dependent upon the more-than-human world," Beavington said in the release.
He blurs the line between the natural and artificial by drawing on AI imagery –— which was originally in the criteria for an earlier competition — as a means of transitioning between clips of nature.
A longtime fan of the musician famed for the solo hit Sledgehammer, Beavington says he was in disbelief when he found out Gabriel would use his video for the song i/o.
“I’m still processing this. I've been mega-fan since I was nine years old and have a shelf dedicated to his albums,” he says. “I admire him not just for his music, but also for his environmental work and human rights activism.”
Beavington’s video and the rest of the creative collaborations can be viewed on the 50:50 website.
