One man and the web's most watched video!
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 10 July 2008, 02:43 IST
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New York: He has already danced to the clicks five million online video lovers. Matt Harding, the 31-year-old American video developer, has become an Internet sensation, with his geeky dances in different locations taking desktops by storm. Named 'Dancing,' the viral video that comes to an inbox near you, has been viewed by more than four million people on YouTube, and perhaps another million on other sites, in the just over two weeks since it appeared. The video, which is among those items that generated highest number of clicks on YouTube, shows a doughy-looking fellow dancing in shorts, hiking boots, performing an arm-swinging, knee-pumping step that could be called goofy. It's the kind of semi-ironic dance that boys do by themselves at junior high mixers when they are too embarrassed to partner with actual girls. Harding, the creator of the video, with some New Agey-sounding music playing in the background, turns up in 69 different locations, including India, Kuwait, Bhutan, Tonga, Timbuktu and the Nellis Airspace in Nevada, where he makes goofy steps in zero gravity. One could see him dancing on the streets in Mumbai for one minute, then on the Giant's Causeway rock formation in Northern Ireland for the next minute, and in a tulip field in the Netherlands or in front of a geyser in Iceland for another minute. Sometimes he does it alone. On a Christmas Island beach he has an audience of crabs, and on Madagascar he performs for lemurs. More often he appears in the company of others: South African street children in Soweto, bushmen in New Guinea, Bollywood-style dancers in India, some oddly costumed waitresses in Tokyo, crowds of free spirits in Paris, Madrid and rainy Montreal, all copying, or trying to, his flailing chicken-step. In the Korean de-militarized zone, he was seen dancing for a lone military policeman unmoved to join him. In many ways 'Dancing' is an almost perfect piece of Internet art: it is short, pleasingly weird and so minimal in its content that it is open to a multitude of interpretations. It could be an allegory of American foreign policy: a bumptious foreigner turning up all over the world and answering just to his own inner music. Or it could be about nothing at all - just a guy dancing. He started doing it at work, years ago, when he was living in Brisbane, Australia. "I'd dance at lunc-htime or during an awkward pause or just to annoy people," Harding said. For him, "It was sort of a nervous tic." Whichever way you interpret it, you can't watch 'Dancing' for very long without feeling a little happier. One can watch the video at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&feature=user

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