Running and Passing.

The World’s Greatest Head Massage is a video that I’ve come back to a number of times over the past few months. It depicts a traveler in Pushkar, India receiving a head massage from a barber/masseuse named Baba. Apart from Baba’s comment to “Go Back, Go Back, Go Back, Relax”, the video is devoid of any dialogue. However, the ambient sounds and application of cosmic energy greatly enhance the performance.

Mirror Neurons: A neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. (via Wikipedia:Mirror_Neuron)

If you dig around in the comments, you’ll find viewers claiming a general state of relaxation and occasional attempts to tie in the theory of mirror neurons. It’s worth noting that a high number of commentators claim to be are repeat viewers.

Other things that I find relaxing or mesmerizing include…

• people water gardens
• street sweepers (white noise)
• leaf blowers (white noise)

** Anyone interested in a collaborative project? I’m open to a range of topics and production methods. Ideally, this collaboration would mimic the read/write ethos of the creative commons and the resulting work would be licensed under agreeable CC conditions. **

In January, I blogged about my interest in licensing work via the Creative Commons and ended up settling on a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license. I have since revised the terms and changed to a bit more open Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The Commons are meant to expand distribution potential while maintaining a given level of control. This allows producers to publish work online while communicating to exactly what can and can’t done with the work. A large portion of my Flickr imagery is now under said license. For more info about the Creative Commons, I’d suggest examining their licensing conditions, case studies, and interviews.

Here are some of our thoughts on the Thirty Days of Smiles project.

• Time flew by, but viewing/making a per day video makes it appear much longer.
• Smiling became significantly easier as we progressed.
• When I look back at my videos I can’t help by smile!
• I either fixed by gaze upon a distant object/thought or looked directly into the camera.
• I enjoyed going off into my own head during the videos, thus organizing thoughts or allowing myself to unconsciously compute daily/weekly happenings.
• I think it’s cool to look back at all the past month and realize it was just a day by day process that I was able to smile through.
• Early on I realized I wanted to remain relatively still throughout the video. I really like the idea that the smile and time are the only active elements.
• I realized I can make a better effort to more fully display my emotions. I’m not sure if I always smile as much or as energetically as I should.
• I like my version of a smile.
• If anything, making videos presents a nice dose of reality and self awareness.
• You make smiling look like the easiest thing in the world.
• It was a lot harder to smile than I expected.
• I didn’t really focus on anything.  I’m sure a lot of my time was spent thinking about how it looked like I was barely smiling (and making myself try to smile “bigger”).
• I realized I spend the majority of my time at home in two places.
• I had no idea what I looked like when I work, I kind of like it.
• It hasn’t changed how I look at my own smile.  If anything, I like it even less.
• Watching myself for so long led to more negative than positive thoughts.  Yesterday all I could think about is how my one eyelid is bigger than the other (eczema makes it puffy and weird).
• Five minutes didn’t seem so long after a while.
• Doing this when I was sick was rough.  Took so much willpower.
• Overall I’m proud of myself for posting so much recorded time of myself online.  Not that anyone is necessarily looking at it, but the possibility is there.  I don’t put up 99% of pictures of myself because I think I look gross.
• I think my smiles are best with animals around.

You can view the videos at thirtydaysofsmiles.tumblr.com (recommended order) or in the Thirty Days of Smiles Vimeo Group.

Amy and I just wrapped up our Thirty Days of Smiles experiment.  During those thirty days, we refrained from disucssing the project, so it will be interesting to compare our opinions, intent, and overall impression of the smiles and the project itself. You can view the videos at thirtydaysofsmiles.tumblr.com or in the Thirty Days of Smiles Vimeo Group.