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 Remember series (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, shared experience, and social phenomena” include Flashmob Compilation (2023) and Maid of the Mist VII (2023). The tension between compilation, “found-footage thing,” and video art is a productive one, teased out further by Batto’s short documentary Honeycomb (2024), also composed entirely of found footage, here from vlogs, television broadcasts, and security cameras concerning the 2020–22 phenomenon of catalytic converter theft in the United States. The titular “honeycomb” is the part of the converter which filters toxic engine exhaust into non-(or less) polluting gases, made of precious rare metals including platinum, rhodium, and palladium. Looters—though with a small stretch, one might also call them “archivists,” or “programmers”—would hack these components from the bottom of parked vehicles, separate the “honeycomb,” and melt and pan it down into something like pure rhodium, which, at one point, sold for $21,000 per ounce.
The film’s content and the process of its making share an obsession with the untapped value sitting where it’s least expected, open for the taking for any thief or archivist armed with a YouTube-to-mp4 converter or a Sawzall. There’s an air of frantic activity that follows the realization that something meaningful or valuable could be sitting unattended on the bottom of one’s car or the results of a YouTube search sorted by view count bottom-to-top.
One of the primary affective qualities of Michael Jackson Vigils, Batto’s first feature, is a sense of overwhelm. The film begins with a visual device to which it returns throughout: a rotating prism whose every side is composed of a five-by-four grid of rectangular videos from the day, such that twenty videos play simultaneously on screen. Batto abruptly keys in on one such video, showing the Botafumeiro swinging incense at a Spanish cathedral, then cuts to a few seconds of ultrasound footage, then another shot that seems to show a group of refugees on a lifeboat. The process of cataloguing each scene quickly becomes futile.
As with WTO/99 (2025), Ian Bell’s found-footage documentary chronicling four days of anti-globalization protests in Seattle, locating the material was one thing, and boiling it down to a coherent cut quite another. “I have playlists that I’ve created that have maybe 800 videos,” Batto tells me. “I had a work-in-progress screening last June, but I couldn’t stop finding videos even after that. It was becoming an issue.”

Batto is concerned with the global—his gridded arrays of videos are often positioned atop a digital rendering of the rotating earth. As more and more daily experience is captured on video, the archive grows but becomes increasingly unstable. Batto chose June 25, 2009, as his subject not for its special place in his heart as an MJ fan, but because it was a moment when much of the world’s diffuse energy was harnessed in one direction.
“You always hear people saying, ‘Where were you when Michael Jackson died?’” Batto says. “In my lifetime, there hasn’t really been another death that was so effective, culturally.” For the cast of thousands of There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Videos Throughout The Night, many would answer that they were on the computer. “I was at a friend’s house, one of the first times that we had smoked weed,” Batto told me of his own June 25, 2009. “Someone said that Michael Jackson died, and we all huddled around his desktop computer.”
The year 2009 was also the start of the front-facing camera boom, when YouTube vlogs were a nascent genre. For many, their first response to the news was to turn these cameras on and record their impressions, typically for an audience in the single digits. We see one emo teenager sarcastically crying, several individuals making threats against the blogger Perez Hilton (who had claimed Jackson’s death was a publicity stunt), and others reacting to the day’s other celebrity death, Farah Fawcett’s. “One of Charlie’s Angels just became an angel herself,” one amateur film reviewer says in front of a framed poster for Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998).
Batto follows mourners out into the streets of Los Angeles as they gather in grief around the Walk of Fame star of the British radio DJ Michael Jackson (the other Jackson’s star was underneath the red carpet outside the premiere of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno). It’s a fitting moment for a film that functions as a double memorial—for the King of Pop and for a moment in time where the internet’s cacophony could still sound something like a single chorus.
It’s the sense of naïveté that attracts Batto to spectacles of joint online-IRL experience—flash mobs, dance crazes, celebrity deaths. “With all these videos I found,” he tells me, “there’s this through-line of innocence. People didn’t care about how they looked on their webcam, or how they came off, in the same way they do today. They were just experimenting with this new technology.”
Watching the cascade of early YouTube footage comprising Batto’s film, I was put in mind of the work of Mitchell and Kenyon, the “Local Films for Local People” made in the final decade of the nineteenth century, showing, among other things, the curious faces of British children encountering a movie camera for the first time. I returned to these historical documents on YouTube after viewing Batto’s film. Flanked by suggestions for ASMR sleep aids, AI-generated trailers, and hype and aura edits, one sees an odd kinship between the soot-marked faces of children exiting factories and the webcam-captured mourners in Batto’s film, a profound innocence compressing the long century between 1897 and 2009—and both seeming as long way off from 2026.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the film’s premiere was accompanied by a giveaway of refurbished third-generation iPod Touches, preloaded with the film as well as a playlist. There was also a Michael Jackson impersonator, who fell asleep partway through the film (“I asked him what he thought afterwards, and he said it was ‘okay,’” Batto reports).

When I ask Batto about the possibility of making a similar film for a more recent celebrity death, say Charlie Kirk, he says that today’s internet doesn’t create discernible moments in the same way. “It’s all so fleeting,” Batto told me. “You can’t really hold it anymore.”
There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night does much to make evident the acceleration of audiovisual history. Like the catalytic converter thieves, he seems to be waiting at the end of a certain product’s life-cycle. Batto’s work is to span the gaps—between artist and archivist, between 2026 and 2009—and if he’s mournful for a lost innocence, he’s also keenly aware of what might still be stripped for parts.