In the beginning was the word, and the word was not mediated. Rather, the word was pragmatic and empirical and learned from nature: a swollen sky signified not only a festering storm and a potentially ruined crop, but perhaps also an angry goddess--a deity who demanded recompense. In this ancestral environment, the Olympian gods might descend from the clouds and assume human form and beget demi-gods, but always they remained just beyond reach.

As polytheism evolved into monotheism, the God of Judeo-Christianity became even more reclusive than His predecessors. Although miracles were prevalent, those whom God appeared to were few and carefully selected. The most one could hope for was a pillar of fire or a burning bush. Like the Israelites and the Greeks and those before them, we mortals toiled through the day, and at night we contemplated the heavens. What lay beyond? As Arthur C. Clarke writes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, "How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars and Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars." But now it is the blush of the millenium; 2001 hovers in the near future. Although modern humanity probes rather than merely contemplates the stars, we are still there, searching for answers. In this quest, perhaps the manner of creature that we seek are not extra-terrestrials but Hollywood stars: celebrities.

The barriers of distance may be crumbling between Us and Them, but shared media has subsequently obscured both the heavens and reality: Tom Hanks survived Apollo 13; 2001 is now a film; Tori Amos has been to Venus and back. Celebrities, those celestial traces, are not ensconced on a distant mountaintop: they are at the fish market, the gas station, Starbucks. For those not fortunate enough to live in La-La Land, there is the Internet. Twenty-four hours a day, 352 days a year, a body can chat (under an assumed name) about any given celebrity. That is an accessibility and a reliability that even family and friends do not always deliver.

We make friends with these distant others, negotiating curious, albeit deferred, relationships with them. When you summon images of your favorite celebrity, you may possess more knowledge, gleaned as it is from mediated discourses, about their life than that of your mother, your spouse, your lover, yourself. You recognize the catch in their breath [on your sound system], the furrow on their brow [on your TV screen], their latest project [from an interview posted on the Net].

In "real" life we are not always privy to moments of intimacy. We do not always recall our formative experiences. Although we never witness our parents' first kiss, we have seen that moment forged by hundreds of other couples on soap operas, sitcoms, films. We endure and survive these "fictional" courtships, love affairs, and breakups-all without ever leaving our couch and/or our monitor.

How can we not import these behavioral patterns into our "real" lives? We don't live in an unmediated reality. We never did. And what's more, we are not, and have never been, where we are. The distant, the unexplained, the fantastic have always intruded upon, displaced, replaced our immediate surroundings. The recent growth in entertainment media, and its impact on our lives, is just the latest form taken by this fragmentation of supposed "reality."

We call our present milieu "Celebreality." We believe you've always been here, always in a world where what is near and familiar jostles for attention with what is distant and strange, be it the stars in the sky, the Gods of theology, the stars of the screen...