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鈥檚 song i/o for his successful submission, which he says resonates with his teaching
With a recent initiative called , 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.
鈥淭he song i/o is short for input/output and it鈥檚 about the interconnection of life,鈥� says Beavington, also a recipient of a 2025 West Coast Teaching Award. 鈥淢y 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鈥檚 video is a compilation of nature footage he鈥檚 gathered over the years. This includes clips taken on S岣磁岣� (Mayne Island), in rivers and shores throughout the Pacific Northwest and in Colombia鈥檚 Amazon Rainforest while teaching KPU鈥檚 Amazon Interdisciplinary Field School.
鈥淲e like to think we're separate and apart 鈥� this human exceptionalism idea 鈥� but this song points out that that's not the fact. We鈥檙e 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 鈥撯�� which was originally in the criteria for an earlier competition 鈥� 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.
鈥淚鈥檓 still processing this. I've been mega-fan since I was nine years old and have a shelf dedicated to his albums,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 admire him not just for his music, but also for his environmental work and human rights activism.鈥�
Beavington鈥檚 video and the rest of the creative collaborations can be viewed on the .
