There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night
A day in the life of the internet is impossible to reconstruct as a feature film. The pace of the scroll is too quick; any given snapshot is too algorithmically myopic to be comprehensive. There’s too much that evades notice, and still more that evades preservation. With the slow obsolescence of search engines—lost first to advertisements, then to optimization, and now to artificial intelligence—our digital past gets blurrier still. With There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night, Marcus Batto attempts the impossible, reconstructing June 25, 2009, the day of Jackson’s death, exclusively through the found footage available online.
Batto, 31 years old, is an artist, archivist, programmer, and something of a YouTube ethnographer. “Growing up,” he says, “I wanted to be a filmmaker. I fell into editing first, then making these found-footage things, never really knowing if they fit into the category of film or music videos or even just art pieces.” He was twelve years old when “Charlie Bit My Finger” was uploaded to YouTube, and his interest hews to this formative first decade of the platform’s history.
For years, beginning during the COVID-19 pandemic, Batto has produced the Certain Moments To Rememberseries (2020–). A favorite entry is RANDOM WEBCAM DANCE @ DA IMAC STORE(2023), a compilation of various people using the then novel front-facing lens on Mac products to film themselves dancing at Apple Stores in 2011. Johnny Duncan and Jane Fricke’s lovelorn rendition of “Stranger” provides the soundtrack. Duncan croons, “Stranger, could I believe in you?” in 1978 as a V-necked teen does the robot in front of a sign advertising the new iPad 2 in 2011, and the doubled nostalgia is imbued with an eerie sense of technological determinism, counterposing the techno-utopia of the Apple Store with the overpopulated graveyard of lost media.
Other editions of this series which Batto’s website describes as “bearing witness to subculture,
Source: filmmakermagazine.com