For four minutes, Michael Jackson sang and danced at the Billboard Music Awards Sunday night in a strange computer-generated fever dream of a live performance. The hologram performance was set to one of Jackson’s posthumous singles, “Slave to the Rhythm,” and apparently took six months to create. It’s not the first time a celebrity has been digitally resurrected, but the effort seems fairly cost-prohibitive.
The Michael Jackson performance on the Billboard Music Awards was the result of nearly half a year of planning, choreography and filming, not to mention the development of new technology. Producers of the Billboard Music Awards did not see even a portion of the film until eight days before the broadcast. “We’ve been talking about it for the last five months and while we were talking about it they were still inventing the process,” says BBMA director and producer Larry Klein. “It was really strange talking about something that did not exist.” Jackson, in hologram form, performed “Slave to the Rhythm” midway through Sunday night’s show with a five-piece band and 16 dancers live onstage.
