Dancing with Matt

It's a quiet afternoon here in the office, so I offer up a happy-distraction: The latest, and by far greatest, of the Matt Harding "Dancing" travel videos. If you're not up to speed on Matt's Travels, here's a quick recap. Harding grows up in Connecticut playing video games. He catches the travel bug while living in Australia, and begins shooting a little video of him dancing a silly jig wherever he goes. He eventually strings the clips together and sets them to music, and the first video becomes an internet phenomenon. Stride gum catches on, and sends him around the world - again - to shoot another. By now he's become an international dancing sensation. But he realizes that throughout his travels, he's been dancing alone. So he convinces Stride to foot the bill for another trip, only this time he reaches out to his many fans and invites them to dance alongside. The result is, quite simply, beautiful.

It's this video that the New York Times called "an almost perfect piece of Internet art: it's short, pleasingly weird and so minimal in its content that it's open to a multitude of interpretations. It could be a little commercial for one-world feel-goodism." And last week World Hum named Harding their Traveler of the Year, calling the video "simple yet deeply touching...If there exists on YouTube a more powerful invocation to travel, and to reach out to others and make friends along the way, we haven't seen it."

Like I said, a happy distraction. Try not to get inspired, or misty-eyed even while watching.

Via World Hum | Video