So if Situationist films, are about film
and Situationist books are about literature,
then Situationist new media and websites are about convergence of media?

The machine is in trouble.
The spectacle, integrated, by integrated media.

What the spectacle does: (see my FEAR piece)

Or take VH1, E! and MTV. Networks whose collective vision is apparently to reinforce the entertainment spectacle, rather than provide entertainment value.

An unfortunate example was on the other night. It was a special on the top 25 sexiest people. In music.
So they ran backwards through all the celebrities they'd chosen, using a panel whose sole function was to serve the already bloated egos of the celebrities, while attempting to corral authority and impress a point upon an already miserable audience. A prime example of "join or get left behind." I was left to feel very empty and very separate from the experience.

I mean, there was scarcely a point to be made. The #1 sexiest celebrity in music, is apparently J Lo. VH1 had about 2 hours of infotainment to get to that point. The career highlights this program director had selected, at best hit upon the artist's tabloid value, sandwiched by a musical clip which would have stumped even the top Name That Tune fan.

These all lead to desperate actions.

Which of course, is no label that a true music fan would ever have created. I mean, who would attempt to lessen the value of sound? Tritely, a label about belief, it promotes the fear and rejection of a methodology, by narrowing it into a stereotype. It leaves artifacts that appear to be from a clannish, cultish behavior, intended to exclude and filter, rather than embracing.

The problem is that it also attracts, as a predetermined quantity, a nihilistic audience by preying upon their insecurity as matched by the spectacle; it presents them with safe options, to create an illusion of security, a blanket of safeness through separatism.

Yet another musical form does become a bit secular, and private, which pisses me off. I mean, all things should be made for all people. The fact that some people just won't get what you do, there's really no dialectic to address that. Elitism is no justification for creating a piece of artwork or a religion.

Similarly, the school of thought that says that the something is better because it's harder to get is really lost.

By creating sects, we reinforce a belief, which some people experience through that filter. Therefore, separatist behaviors appear to be separate from the world, whereas they're all connected. Everything in life is connected.

The point of life is to know it, and to understand it.

* With the exception of Noel’s internet billboard gags.

Later during the third season, I updated his site independently of the show, in a move to keep it fresh, adding a completely Flash-based navigation, updated CraneFaces, and Noel's online plea-bargain for employment ("Hire Me - pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease"). This web portfolio got Noel the opportunity in Seattle which first, risked separating him from Felicity, then resulted in his inviting her to leave New York (and Ben) for an opportunity as co-curator of the web-arts projects he was to art direct. When the "dot-bomb" ended, and Noel stayed in NYC, he was able to use the site to extend his personal growth while building up his solo design business before the team joined forces and were absorbed into Webb Graphics.

Of those who made repeat visits, the appearance of a mostly-finished site waiting there for them prompted a few bewildered messages on Noel’s e-mail server.
Who are you? I know you’re not really Noel Crane, so who maintains this site? e-mail me @...

I expected this site to say something like “wow, you really watch tv too closely if you’re actually looking for this website.” ...Are you Scott Foley?”

The majority of mail returning to the site was principally complimentary; some notes written by people also “in character” with Kelvin Hall’s residential policy, a friendly wink to the site’s deadpan promotional nature.

I’m a little computer illiterate. Could you come to room 408 to help me with my browser?...Thanx—- I’m 2 doors down on the left ; )

I think it’s hilarious that there is an actual Noel Crane website! ...This is great.

Noel...could you please update it? It’s not difficult, you know? There *are* weekends.

An early decision was made to keep Noel off-line as webmaster, principally for cost and organizational reasons. After all, who would be Noel every day?

Who would make time to respond to every playful request for advice, or respond to a legitimate cry for help? A qualified therapist? A former resident advisor?
; - ) Noel...himself?

Lacking an obvious solution for this startup concept, an agreement was established with the producers to portray Noel as a real student with a real website, but the catch was that “his e-mail server would be down”; for legal reasons, Noel would be personally out of touch with his fans, due to an unspecified technical problem. This way Noel would keep harassing his Internet Service Provider, hopefully the volumes of mail flooding in might show a way for the online future of Noel.

At time of writing, the issue of who will answer Noel’s e-mail remains unresolved. Noelcrane.com has been added to dozens of fan sites and logged into hundreds of search engine entries from its beginnings as word of mouth.

The site has succeeded in creating synchronous movement between Noel’s web world and its public peer, Felicity, via a website which continues to inform the show’s character and vice-versa.

The site prompts us to roll the mouse over Noel’s outgoing ad message. We click through into Noel’s landscape representation of the New York City skyline, as it crawls horizontally across the monitor screen. perhaps another day in the life of a cabbie.

Here, we enter Noel’s world...A photo gallery. Noel’s family from home...even some of his New York snapshots, including the worst pictures of the Statue of Liberty ever.

His resume. (Do you think any viewers knew Noel’s first job was designing signs for a copy center in Boston? Or that his favorite kind of music was 70’s soul and acid jazz?)

We gain admittance to yet another of Noel’s student web activities...a button at the bottom of his resume points a hyperlink to the beginnings of a... future business concept? CraneFaces is the place for Noel’s personal designs, with typographic line showings and type specimens.

A typographic poem...the beginnings of a portfolio. Beginnings to an evolving guide to NYC for freshmen and tourists... These, in keeping with Noel’s onscreen sense of wit, and charm, connect us even further to Noel and his tastes by creating a background.

One week later, it was in front of the television audiences again, as though to confirm the ghost-URL for those who only thought they half-heard the line due to the interference of election night coverage a week previously. On November 10th, Noel found himself explaining it to Felicity; this time in an act of overt self-justification, as she enters his dorm-room seeking advice:1

Felicity: Are you busy?
Noel: Just working on my page.
Felicity: Your what?
Noel: My webpage. Noelcrane.com
Felicity: Why do you have a webpage?
Noel: Why does anyone have a web page? Too much free time, not enough friends, justifying owning a computer...

Before he knew it, Noel was upgrading his old Macintosh IICi for a Bondi Blue iMac, Felicity’s own words still resonating, “Wow...Noelcrane.com hit the big time!”2

1 Felicity F706 “Drawing the line” by J.J. Abrams.
2 Felicity F710 “Gimme An O” by Jennifer Levin.

In fact, there were no mentions to a TV show called Felicity, or even the girl named Felicity at first, but only a passing nod here or there (later, a monthly activities planner for Kelvin Residential Hall boasted the signature “F. Porter” roughly two weeks after Felicity was seen by millions discussing its imminent deadline with Noel.)

I like to think of this as an idea called internet theater: another means of tapping into the web’s awesome entertainment potential. Maintaining a theatrical suspension of disbelief; a positive sense of disorientation, but in a the word...a misdirection, potentially a red herrings.

By presenting an idiosyncratic homepage masquerading as a student’s web site, the viewers gained a private window to some of Noel’s graphic tastes and insights. Any television site’s main objective is, of course, to invite a following, and to encourage a dialogue with the show’s audience, and this seemed to be working.

By also leaving out any commercial ties-in or overt plugs* to any overt signs of sponsorship quickly began to get the Felicity listservers and mailgroups talking. In many cases, fans who learned of the site would bookmark it onto pages they created for the show as well.

Noelcrane.com experienced a sharp rise in visits over the next weeks, capping just over 43,000 visits during the month of November; almost entirely by word-of-mouth, and most of the time resulting in repeat visitors. It was a fairly auspicious start for a web site not yet logged in the search engines or tagged at the end of the program.

Noel namedropped his website URL, www.noelcrane.com, for the first time on-air during this conversation. It appeared as a moment of nonchalance, nearly lost in a scene of great academic tension. The Dean started by asking Noel if he had ever used the internet. Noel replied, “I actually have my own webpage... Noelcrane.com.” Before many of those watching knew what had occurred, The Dean had already returned to the subject at hand, piracy of term papers via the web.

The Dean’s glassy and unappreciative stare may have interfered with Noel’s immediate need for validation, but curious and potentially concerned viewers everywhere raced to their internet to check this one out.

Thoughts on Noel Crane...Denial?
"Why must I experience all of this? Only to feel so completely alone? I just don't want them to know that it's me I'm putting out there."

Perhaps it illuminated something, which was both personal, and truly important, about the work which was about to take place in the ensuing months: I was about to assume the role of a fictional character, and create a website for him as transparently as possible, as though created by him -- and this attention I would receive would be both unprecedented in its appeal to fans, and profound to its creator, personally.

The gauge for success on such a sitework would come from its seamlessness with the hyperreality it created around the television show Felicity -- I knew that I might resent having my identity mistaken for his, from time to time -- but if properly executed, it would have all of my life and my person included, and no one would ever find out that I was behind any of it.

An ironic reward for success, to say the least.

We'd had this kind of talk before, so when it came up preceding ALIAS, few words were exchanged, and I already knew pretty much what he wanted to set up; we'd already tested it, to great effect, on the audience of his then-current show "Felicity", using Noelcrane.com as a place to set up and to play with an idea about reality, the internet, and the fourth wall, which, in cinema, as well as television.

This time, the idea would be much bigger.

Special importance is placed upon every designer’s ability to express him or herself clearly; also to be able to explain that work. Its relevance.

But more often than not, I do something first, based upon me liking it, me believing in it. And then, over the passage of time, do I figure out what it is exactly that I have made.”

– Noel Crane, Touchstone Television

It's an interesting hypothesis, that perhaps time is not that important. That perhaps it's a man-made idea that can actually be appreciated where the notion time-travel could be approximated through spells of stillness; namely, where the human condition begins to reverse its trend of acceleration – more, senselessly, more, faster, faster – and instead begins to witness the effects of stillness upon the body.

Patience and stillness appear to be somehow related. Few people we know express a consciously-created lifestyle of deliberate inactivity; it seems anathema to our times. Yet stillness appears to be a metaphor for focus,

+++

Of course, censorship is a big buzz. We are even getting conditioned to respond to the sound of the word like it's this major, unnecessary evil and that anything and everything ever connected to the idea, by association, becomes a serious threat to all enlightened cultures.

So, we've kind of begun to throw away the editing process too.

One day, Fred may be speaking to Lucy on a sort of authoritative kind of level -- about servers and computers and streaming technologies. We can, for the sake of example, assume that Fred knows something about these technologies that Lucy has yet to full grasp, and he's in the process of sharing some of that with her.

Before going on, it must be addressed, that there is a difference between Fred having the intention to communicate, and then there's just talk for the sake of establishing a power relationship. Fred may be pcking up signs from Lucy that she's getting fatigued, and he could exercise an option to slow down and clarify.

Fred loves the idea that he is slightly more powerful than Lucy, however; in many ways it's what their relationship is based upon, so instead, he stays focused on the goalposts -- the topic, which in this case is how servers stream information to five users at a time. If Lucy doesn't address the overwhelm now, she has another option, which is to accept the status quo of their relationship, and to let Fred dominate. Lucy is tired anyway; the only differnce here is that Fred didn't deliberately communicate with intention; it's a by-product of what he was really doing, which is showing her who has the greatest power of endurance -- the speaker, triumphing over the listener.

Why is this relevant then? I don't know, it just is, really.