Beyond The News Horizon
The Most Reflective Work of Art on the Net.
Beyond The News Horizon
The New Zoid Times™ is a work of art created by Daniel Young with the help of computer programmers. It continuously deconstructs the latest news headlines and reassembles the pieces into new, counterfeit headlines. It does so without the participation of human minds. The results are amusing, absurd, shocking and thought-provoking. Often, they are indistinguishable from "real" news. The proprietary program produces a high level of coherent results, supporting our claim it is the most sophisticated automatic transformer of changing textual material on the internet.
As befits a deep work of art the New Zoid Times™ is seminal and ambiguous. In one respect it is a revealing, stimulating and continuous reflection of our world. In this respect it is much like a funhouse mirror whose distortions can entertain and inform. In another sense it mocks the flood of information and misinformation which characterizes our period in human history. In so doing it promotes a healthy and critical detachment from the manipulations of the prevailing media and the powers behind them. In the same vein it offers the creative and liberating possibility of writing personal headlines and inserting them into the transformed news of the world.
On the deepest level the New Zoid Times™ demonstrates the crucial operation of unpredictable chance in life. After all, what is reality but the mixing of units of possibility by forces which we can never fully understand or control? This connects to another design of Daniel Young, the life-guidance philosophy of Luckism® and Neoligion®. Those interested in learning more are invited to visit www.luckism.org.
The first headline transformation program designed by Young began operating in April 2001 as Newzoid.com. Over the years Young neglected the site; it lost its functionality and, eventually, its domain. Now, Young has revived it with a more robust program and a more advanced and secure functionality.
Emails can be sent to young (at) newzoidtimes.com. Please note that Young may not be able to respond to all communications.
What follows is fictional material written by Young to accompany the original Newzoid site and the earlier version of the New Zoid Times™. This was done in order to present them as headlines from the parallel worlds theorized by some physicists.
The New Zoid Times is based on the quantum physics and parallel world discoveries of Professor Daniel Young, formerly of the Institute For Extremely Advanced Studies (a secret offshoot of the well-known Institute).
It is produced by his friends and supporters. Prof. Young has been a self-styled "fugitive" since 1988, determined to keep his parallel-world breakthroughs away from governments and corporations. He allowed limited use, first by NewZoid and now by The New Zoid Times in the hope that, eventually, (Young's estimate is a thousand years), it will help increase wisdom in this world. A body of scholarly and popular work, centered on NewZoid (the precursor to The New Zoid Times), has begun to develop and excerpts are available on this page.
If and when new material is uncovered it will be published here if it can be done without violating Young's wishes. Please note that the writing on this page is subject to various limitations and redactions required by orders of courts and law enforcement agencies, with all of which we do not agree. Nevertheless, in order to maintain our operation without total disruption of our lives we are conforming to them while challenging them in the appropriate forums.
COMPULSORY NOTICE! The contents of this blog have been redacted by the Federal Bureau of Security under the authority of the Security Act of 1917 and the National Defence Act of 1952. A redacted version is shown here. Those interested in seeing the full text may file an application with the FBS no earlier than December 30, 2050. The New Zoid Times is currently challenging the F.B.S. in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in New Zoid Times vs. F.B.S., Civil Action 00-001264. (Under Seal)
These are the few photographs believed to have escaped Prof. Young's methodical destruction of personal memorabilia.
This was purportedly taken in 1985 by a practitioner of the technique of Cerebellic photography, a method claimed to show a person's mental capacity. Using computer techniques, the Federal Bureau of Security has adjusted it to show how Prof. Young might appear now [2015]. It has been widely circulated by the F.B.S. in the unsuccessful twenty-seven-year-long government search for Prof. Young. The authenticity of the original has been the subject of intense debate.
This is a satellite photo believed to show Young on top of a building in New York City in the 1990s.
At one point the authorities thought Young was working as a street tango dancer in a tourist district of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Young has a helicopter.
Unverified illustration purportedly showing Young's head on a meditating Buddha body.
Young at a meeting of world leaders.
Young at a secret meeting of his supporters.
[To protect his family and friends Young has used one of his earlier inventions, the IGOR (Information & Gossip Obliterating Robot) to actively remove all unauthorized mention of Prof. Young from the World Wide Web. The following is the biography he submitted to the American Academy For The Advancement of Wisdom in 1998 on the occasion of his election to membership in absentia.]
Daniel Young: Artist, Inventor, Philosopher & Physicist. Responsible for three of the greatest discoveries in human history; the true shape of yin and yang, the magnetic I Ching method, and aleatory communication with parallel worlds. Weighed 14 lbs. 7 oz. at birth. Solved the Pfundt problem at age 14. Expects to be awarded Nobel Prizes for Physics and Literature and hereby rejects them.
1. Young’s Definition of Internet Art (e-mail from Prof. Young, dated April 30, 2001)
NewZoid and its successor, The New Zoid Times, are works of Internet art. They are art because they fall within the definition of art as "an arrangement of material for the purpose of causing a sensory experience." Whose definition is this? It is mine and I will consider it authoritative unless someone can cite a definition that will distinguish more accurately and more consistently between what is art and what is not art. Within the category of art, NewZoid and The New Zoid Times are Internet art because the raw material which they arrange is textual material found on the Internet. In this respect it is the same as giving the art of painting a name based on paint, the raw material which its practitioners use.
2. Young’s Definition of Internet Science (e-mail from Prof. Young, dated April 30, 2001)
NewZoid and its successor, The New Zoid Times, are works of science. They are scientific because they fall within the definition of science as "the examination of circumstances by methods which can be repeated by others." Whose definition is this? It is mine and I will consider it authoritative unless someone can cite a definition that will distinguish more accurately and more consistently between what is science and what is not science." Within the category of science, NewZoid and its successor, The New Zoid Times, are Internet science because the phenomena which they examine are those found on the Internet. In this respect it is the same as giving the science of biology a name based on the fact that it studies living things.
3. Young’s Explanation Of Quantum Reality (Incomplete e-mail transmission, dated April 30, 2001)
"Reality is the complete manifestation of probability. Stated differently, probability is incomplete reality." The failure of the present age to recognize this truth will be looked on by future generations in the same way that we now look on the failure to recognize the roundness of the planet Earth, as a pri.......[transmission ended here]
NZ: Good Morning Professor; we have someone on the line taking shorthand in accordance with your request that recording devices not be used.
Y: Good. Don't waste time because the connection may end at any time.
NZ: Why have you decided to live in hiding?
Y: First, to avoid the various forms of coercion used by governments and corporations. Their only motive is to use my discoveries for enhancing their power and profit. Secondly, it is a good way to do one's work and cultivate one's garden, free of the distractions of fame and the insatiable demands of the media.
NZ: Can you say anything more specific about the dangers of your discoveries?
Y: Let me put it this way.... every major discovery involving fundamental rules of nature has destructive potential. These are always linked to energy. Just consider the uses, good and evil, to which the relatively simple process of combustion has been put. The discoveries related to atomic processes raised the scale of potential destructiveness immensely. My discoveries related to the existence of parallel worlds have the same theoretical potential, but not limited to a single world. They can affect numerous worlds at one time, potentially damaging or destroying things on a scale that is almost beyond the power of imagination. Mind you, I have not reached that point. I have just discovered the fundamental opening, but I have to recognize that it opens up the possibility, however remote, of a misuse of power on an inconceivably vast scale.
NZ: Why not simply keep your work secret forever?
Y: Forever? That can't be. Others will eventually find it. My estimate is that it will be at least a thousand years before anyone replicates my work. That gives time for this world to go through a gradual familiarization with the new state of existence and develop safeguards against misuse. Newzoid [now The New Zoid Times] is the first step in this process. Let people treat it as an amusement ... it doesn't matter. It will begin opening up the human mind to a greater reality. It will increase the chances that the breakthrough will be handled wisely.
NZ: Why do you think we may have as much as a thousand years before someone else makes this discovery?
Y: The conjunction of factors that went into my realization were so highly unusual, so unconnected to any line of research presently being carried out, that it is unlikely to be duplicated in the near future. The chain of events and the thinking were so odd and accidental ... [extended laughter] ... excuse me, that it makes so-called accidental discoveries such as penicillin seem inevitable. I have taken into account the fact that NewZoid will probably lead to an intensification of research in this area.
NZ: But isn't it likely that the same breakthrough was made on parallel worlds and the same restraint may not be shown by the discoverer on some of them?
Y: I cannot answer this question without revealing more than should be presently known about my discovery. But I can assure you that restraint on other worlds will not be a problem so long as restraint is exercised here. I will have to break the connection soon.
NZ: Do you have any recommendations for people who are sympathetic to your position?
Y: Let them act appropriately as circumstances dictate. Keep a close watch on the concentrations of power and on the sources of information. Watch the flow and try to position themselves so as to accomplish ....... [here the connection began to break up] It cannot be a doctrine. Daoism comes closest in my....... but there........... for organized ......... Each individual, I hope .......... [connection broken]
NOTE: We will continue to seek interviews with Prof. Young.
I had been working for almost a year on the problem of what happens to the -------- particle after the ----------------- is resolved. I despaired of finding a solution and decided to go for a weekend to ------------, famous for its ---------. My friends, the well-known ---------- , ________ ________ and his wife, the ---------, ______ ______, took me to their favorite beach, _____ ______. We had a delicious picnic lunch of ---------- and ----------, accompanied by a wonderful ........... from ---------. Immediately afterwards, as I was watching the schools of small ------ in the water, the happy, completely absurd yet overwhelmingly persuasive thought popped into my head that ----------- [deleted to end of paragraph].
In my joy and probably due to my uncontrollable laughter, I fell into the --------- and had to be helped out because the open umbrella I was holding interfered with my swimming.
I asked for pencil and paper and immediately jotted down the .........in a very sketchy way, not taking any time to check my calculations, but feeling that the equations were so beautiful that they must be true. The basic formula, which I have now confirmed beyond ant [sic] reasonble doubt, completely [deleted to end of paragraph]. [back to top]
Today I passed a new milestone. I sent my first headline in the other direction using the [ ----------------- -----------------]. The returning headlines contained meaningful, indirectly related material - although I do not fully understand it. I sent the headline "Young Protects Parallel World Secret For Good Of Humanity." I was overjoyed to receive in subsequent cycles. "Designers Protect Parallel World Secret For War Crimes Court," "Snow Protects Parallel World Secret For 22 Hours" and "Young Protects Parallel World Secret For Record French Audiences." At least it shows that on some worlds ------------------------ [deleted to end of paragraph]. If I can get more --------- I might be able to ----------------- {deleted to end of paragraph]
By Order of the Court, on motion of Defendant F.B.S., the contents of this file are hereby sealed. [signed] Joseph Crater, Senior Judge [back to top]
Those who have come this far deserve the truth. NewZoid is a work of art
(New York, Oct. 15, 2002)
Professor Daniel Young was stingingly rebuked last week by Matthew Mirapaul, a jounalist who covers new media art for the 'Circuits' section of the New York Times. Young apparently made the mistake of approaching Mirapaul about NewZoid for the second time in a year. Young claimed that NewZoid was more advanced than work Mirapaul was reporting and invited him to reexamine NewZoid.
Mirapaul, writing in the tone of a Supreme Court Justice being asked to reconsider a parking ticket, responded " I cannot tell from your message if it has been modified in such a way that I need to revisit it. If so, please explain. Otherwise, try, try again."
Speaking from his bed, where he had retired to lick his wounds, Young said, "We are not in a Renaissance. It is a shame that the reporter covering new media art for a leading newspaper cannot tell the difference between gimmickry and great art."
(New York, May 6, 2002) Professor Daniel Young was placed under sedation after he learned of the five sites nominated for a Webby Award in the Net Art category. "This world must have entered a severe quantum warp," said Professor Young from his sanitarium bed, "the nominees for Net Art look like they belong in the categories of social documentary and technical demonstrations." "In the entire spectrum of parallel worlds I have never seen such a distortion of the meaning of the term 'art,'" added Young. "This may mean we are entering a prolonged Dark Age in which basic terms and rational distinctions will become meaningless. I urge all artists and lovers of art to take appropriate precautions."
(New York, March 20, 2002) NewZoid has received a form e-mail from the Webby Awards. "I thank the Webby Awards for this communication," said Daniel Young, creator of NewZoid. The text of the e-mail was as follows:
Dear 6th Annual Webby Awards Entrant,
Thank you for submitting your site(s) for consideration in this year's Webby Awards. Thousands of entries were received from 36 countries and 44 states.
All sites have completed our review phase, and a short list of those with the highest scores in each category have been passed on to the Nominating Judges for consideration.
Following the model of the other major Academies, we do not publish our short lists, only the nominees.
Nominees will be announced on Tuesday, April 29, 2002. If nominated, you will be contacted directly via email to the address on record. A complete list of nominees will be available at www.webbyawards.com <http://www.webbyawards.com>.
We're glad to be able to consider your site for the best of the Web. Pleasestay tuned.
Best,
Doc Watson drwatson@webbyawards.com
In just 8 months, NewZoid has succeeded in entering the circulatory system of the world's art and entertainment organs. This is a good start to the thousand-year process of safely introducing the reality of parallel worlds to humanity.
I wish all users of NewZoid health and happiness on the road to wisdom.
(New York , Sept. 4, 2001) Daniel Young announced today that the 2001 Nobull Prize for Art would be bestowed on NewZoid Parallel World News Headlines, his work of generative art located at http://www.newzoid.com.
"At the moment, I find it necessary to crown this work of art myself because no one else is qualified or prescient enough to do it," said Young. "By all objective standards NewZoid is the most important work of art created in our time."
NewZoid's status as art was confirmed today when, after an initial rejection caused by quantum disturbances in the fabric of this world's reality, it was accepted for listing on the artbase of Rhizome, the internet art organization. The original rejection, my response and the final acceptance are set out below.
on 5/1/01 3:26 PM, artbase@rhizome.org at artbase@rhizome.org wrote:
Hi Daniel
We receive many requests for inclusion in the Rhizome ArtBase, but are unable to index all of them. We regret that we are unable to include your artwork NewZoid in the ArtBase because it did not meet our selection criteria. The ArtBase is for works of art that are Internet-based and/or are made be experienced online. You may read our selection criteria online at http://rhizome.org/artbase/9.php3 If you have any questions as to why your artwork was not able to be included, please contact me via email (alex@rhizome.org). Best Regards, Alex Galloway Rhizome.org
Hi Alex,
I do have questions about why NewZoid did not meet the selection criteria (reproduced below for easy reference.) I would greatly appreciate if you could be specific about what criteria NewZoid failed to meet and why.
When I looked at the criteria I thought NewZoid was on target with what looked like the most important criteria, namely, 1 and 2 below.
I thought that its innovativeness in manipulating Internet news with unprecedented techniques of textual deconstruction and reconstitution embodied in sophisticated software was extremely high, measured both in a traditional artistic literary context and in the context of other textual artwork on the Net. Please tell me how its innovativeness falls short compared to the work that meets your criteria.
I also thought that its conceptual sophistication, in finding a way to tamper forcefully and imaginatively with a form that is ubiquitous and supremely influential in our society was extremely strong. Here too, I am at a loss to understand what level of conceptual sophistication you have found lacking in NewZoid.
As regards the second criterion, I thought that NewZoid's self-reflective play on many levels with science and art and with the question of its own artistic nature was highly relevant to the discourses of net art and contemporary art. Please tell me what you found deficient in this element.
I grant that NewZoid does not meet Criteria 3, 4, and 5. Because it is my first work of Internet art it has not been discussed anywhere, it has *only* place number one in my ouevre, and it has no provenance. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely, Daniel Young
Alex to Daniel:
you're exactly right. that was a mistake on my part..sorry we're getting a little overworked around here =) i'll follow this email with the normal "approval" email, then you should continue from there. best -ag
Rhizome Selection Criteria
The Rhizome ArtBase includes works of net art that are of potential historical significance. We define net art as artwork that uses the net as a medium and is made to be experienced online. Online displays of work that do not meet these criteria are not included in the ArtBase.
In order to evaluate potential historical significance, we look at:
1. the work's aesthetic innovation, conceptual sophistication or political impact
2. the work's relevance to the discourses of net art and contemporary art in general
3. any discussion of the work itself on Rhizome.org or other relevant networks or publications
4. the work's place in the artist or artists' oeuvre
5. the work's provenance, including commissions, exhibitions and collections
The Witty Museum has reportedly rejected an offer by the enigmatic scientist/artist, Daniel Young, to let them show NewZoid, Young's purported headline link to parallel worlds. A representative of Young would not confirm the discussions but did say that Young had been favorably impressed by the fact that Pixel Bandwith, the museum's Director, had labeled NewZoid "a massive insult to contemporary art." A spokesperson for the Museum said that Young's work was considered science rather than art.
"Ezra Pound said a long time ago that artists are the antennae of the human race," said Young. "If so, I am one of the biggest dish antennae in history." "At the outer limits where I am working," added Young, "the distinction between art and science is meaningless." [back to top]
(Prof. Stanislaw Lembo in the Journal of Newzoidology, Spring 2001)
The occasional grammatical errors in the headlines may be an indication that the stochastic capacity of Young’s apparatus is inadequate. I prefer this simple explanation to Prof. Numski’s unfounded speculation that English grammar is different on these other worlds. Of course, when Prof. Young sees fit to tune his instruments to other languages, we will be able to make a more measured evaluation. [back to top]
Prof. Pamela Caligula: It is obvious that we are seeing a mixture of headlines from more than one parallel world. An analysis of the multiphasic Clinton persona in NewZoid headlines is enough to prove this. We have headlines in which a Clinton is the leader of a large country, several different types of criminal, an actor, a sex god, a minister, a chef and a magician.
Prof. Sheila Wolf: I object. It is entirely possible for a person to encompass those careers in one world in a single lifetime. This proves nothing. After all, I am a professor, a Black Belt in Mikaido, a trained auto-mechanic, a glider pilot and a rap singer.
Prof: Caligula: You forgot to add that you were also a perfect example of feminist over-compensation for the loss of classic feminine qualities and a leading contributor to the myth of masculine omni-competence. I consider the existence of Young's parallel worlds to be much more believable than your qualifications in these various disciplines.
Prof. Wolf: I'll see you outside, you.....
Moderator: Please ... let’s stick to the subject. [back to top]
- (a column in the weekly tabloid The Scoop that purports to explain NewZoid headlines. NewZoid is currently suing them in state court in Idaho and this extract does not indicate acquiescence to their copyright infringement.)
This has been a mystifying week on NewZoid, with some items that make us grateful we are living on this particular version of Planet Earth. Highlights of the 234,000 headlines we looked at this week were the following:
Hollywood Stars Have Own Pathway to the Brain - Our experts think this means that on some worlds the movie audience is under mind control. It may be that movie stars have obtained ownership of special means to directly transmit their movies into the brains of the audience. After seeing this headline Stephen Spielberg reportedly decided to finance research in this area.
Santeria Priests Take Ugly View of Life on Alaska Border - Why this religion should be concerned with life on the Alaska border has puzzled our best minds. The best suggestion we've heard is that religious conflicts forced them to move north in the world where this headline originated.
Eastman Kodak Reveals Teen Social Life in Countryside - Our analysts think this is a world where total surveillance corporations help maintain social order. Apparently, socializing among teenagers is forbidden, which makes this item news in that world.
Clinton Pays $173,200 for Breast Implants?? - We had a split of opinion on this one. Some of us thought it was a relatively straightforward piece of speculative news about a female named Clinton. Others think it refers to a possible world in which breast enhancement is sought by males. In either case the high price shows a world in which medical costs resemble ours.
Bush Ends Holy Year, Says Not Time to Smoke - Bush, the name of a person who has achieved the Presidency of the United States in this and some other worlds, is here apparently a person occupying a position of high religious authority. Smoking may be forbidden during a holy year and it is probably the duty of this leader to announce when it may be resumed. [back to top]
- (Editorial from the magazine devoted to the exposure of unscientific claims)
Unparalleled Effrontery - Without evidence that Prof. Young is alive and without verification of his results by the scientific community we must conclude that NewZoid's so-called parallel-world headlines are a desecration of Science and an attempted fraud on all those who believe in the scientific way of life. It resembles the work of the notorious crypto-Daoist Daniel Young who, ten years ago, claimed to have found a scientific way of consulting the I Ching. That too was supported by a pastiche of half digested quantum concepts. (See our issue of June 1988) [back to top]
- (Disassociated Press Jan. 23, 2001)
A lawsuit brought by the actor Flint Westwood against NewZoid, the website purporting to present news headlines from parallel worlds, has been dismissed by the U.S. District Court in New York. The headline alleged to be libelous was "Flint Westwood Endorses Pantyhose For Police." The court ruled that NewZoid was either free from liability because it was indeed receiving news from parallel worlds or, alternatively, its headlines were automated aleatory creations, lacking the intention or malice needed to constitute libel. Westwood's lawyers say they will appeal.. [back to top]
(by Prof. Jaroslav Pelicula in the Pompeiian Journal of Physics)
My calculations show that, given the sub-holographic continuum theorized by Prof. Broh, there is enough room in the unused corner of a typical living room for 10 to the 26th parallel worlds. Similarly, if we reverse the calculation, our world could fit into the stomach of a small frog in a small pond in the super- holographic continuum. [back to top]
(by Ovid Dangly, Chairman of Dangly & Paisley (Advertising Sage Magazine, Dec. 12, 2000)
Wherever there is civilization there is advertising. Our ongoing study of NewZoid shows numerous references to corporate and brand names, product liability and pollution. These are strong indicia that advertising is present on other worlds. We should make every effort to transmit our ads in the hope of arousing a response. I urge everyone in this profession to use the headline transmission experiment of NewZoid for that purpose.
I also appeal to Prof. Young to come forward and join us in an attempt to extend the benefits of our world to others. I give him my personal guarantee that there will be no misuse of this opportunity. And I close by saying to him, from the bottom of my heart, "Name Your Price." [back to top]
- (placed in 72 of the world’s largest newspapers on Earth Day 2000. as an open letter to Professor Young from 583 of the world's leading intellectuals.)
Dear Professor Young,
We congratulate you on your unprecedented breakthrough.
We urge you to release it for the benefit of mankind and womankind. There is good reason to believe that, given communication with other worlds, it may be possible to find cures for diseases, new foods for feeding humanity and new sources of energy to alleviate poverty and suffering in our world.
Your genius, great as it is, cannot replace the collective wisdom of humanity. We volunteer to establish an international panel of intellectuals to guide the use of this discovery and to insure that it is not misused by governments or corporations.[back to top]
(from Nolan Silverfarb's article in The Journal of Uncertified Accounting, August, 2000))
I begin with the fact that, in order to control the demands on his equipment and leave room for his continued experimentation, Prof. Young has limited NewZoid to showing 20 headlines at a time to a visitor. According to my calculations, if a person is willing to wear out a finger, he or she can get (but certainly not read) as many as 864,000 NewZoid headlines in a day. NewZoid can be activated faster than reading speed, let us say, at a rate of a new set of 20 every 2 seconds. That would make 600 a minute and 36,000 an hour, leading to the 864,000 mentioned above. Pointless, but interesting.
If a desire to read the headlines is assumed, then I calculate that 122,4000 can be read in a day. This does not take finger strain, back strain, eye strain, brain strain, eating or going to the toilet into account. Assuming that a speedy reader can read a headline in less than a second and therefore reads all 20 in 18 seconds and it takes 2 seconds for him or her to receive a new set of twenty, sixty headlines can be received in a minute. Applying this rate of approximately one headline a second, that means a diligent reader can cover 900 in a quarter-hour, 3600 in an hour and 122,400 in a 24-hour period [back to top]
(Prof. Liam O'Gravity in Kansas City Computing)
Young has not given us any information at all about how he is paring down the flow of headlines. But certain deductions can be made. First and most obviously, he is eliminating all headlines not written in English. This is not hard to do. Second, and this is more difficult, he is eliminating repetitive headlines. Prof. Matthew Klein and others who are well-versed in parallel world theory assure me that there are countless billions of worlds whose content will be virtually indistinguishable from ours. This means that their headlines will have little or no meaningful differences from our own. Young has apparently found a way to set the reception apparatus so that it operates beyond the zone of recognizable similarity and, for the most part, bring in headlines from beyond the point at which worlds begin to noticebly differ from our own. Third and finally, the laws of parallel world physics dictate that there must be countless worlds in which the headlines, though written in English, are incomprehensible to us because the worlds are too different from our own in grammar and usage. Here too, Young, has must have found a way to to block all or most of those headlines. The remainder of this article will be devoted to a discussion of Young's possible filtering techniques. [back to top]
(From the Footnotes column in the N.Y. Review of Literature, July 12, 2000)
Reports have reached us that the unavailibility of critical work on the Internet by the noted literary deconstructionist Professor Kevin Kennedy is due to a vendetta by Professor Daniel Young, eccentric discoverer of the parallel worlds. Young apparently took offense in 1998 when Kennedy called NewZoid, Young's headline web site, "the ultimate deconstructionist masterpiece" and "irrefutable proof of the transcendence of unintentionality in art." Young used his web-erasing robot IGOR, to permanently remove all trace of Kennedy's literary criticism. As a result, Kennedy has been forced to become an expert on international trade. Kennedy's internet writings on that subject are untouched by Young's robot. [back to top]
by Lupe de Trema
Daniel Young's NewZoid is very seductive at the technological level, in addition to being intellectually and theoretically interesting. I understand he has been working for about ten years just on the technological apparatus of the piece alone. Its interest is by no means restricted to postcolonial issues. The piece deals with issues of power, history, memory, virtuality, architecture, presence, sensuality, desire, agency, and colonization, within and outside the virtual. It is an incredibly layered and complex piece. [back to top]
by Deidrich Bartusch (translated from the German)
There is, to be sure, a reading of Young's NewZoid which can hardly be ignored when we gaze at this particular work, and that is Heidegger’s central analysis in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, which is organized around the idea that the work of art emerges within the gap between Legend and News, or what I would prefer to translate as the meaningless materiality of the bardic medium and reportage and the meaning endowment of history and of the social. We will return to that particular gap or rift later on; suffice it here to recall some of the famous phrases that model the process whereby these headlines slowly re-create about themselves the whole missing object world which was once their lived context. [back to top]
Much more convincing than the conception of NewZoid as an inter-universal linguistic communicator seems to be the thesis that it is a text written with artistic intentions. The author uses and arranges linguistic material differently and with other goals than in standard communication. Hence, the actualization of linguistic levels in NewZoid differs from conventions of practical, scientific, or any kind of non-artistic communication: NewZoid's reader can therefore discover not only deviations from "normal" sociolects and styles, i.e., various kinds of figurativeness, additional or superordinate organization of sound, lexico-syntactic, and semantic material, but most of all their greater density and structural coherence. [back to top]
(Van Huysmann 2001)
As we went to press the world of physics was shaken by news that Professor Daniel Young, formerly of the Institute for Extremely Advanced studies had partially released information about his long-rumored breakthrough in communicating with parallel worlds. He allowed an internet website named NewZoid to display news headlines from parallel worlds. NewZoid is a logical outgrowth of the many-worlds interpretation (or, more accurately, the many-universes interpretation) of quantum physics. The many-worlds interpretation was developed in the 1950s by Hugh Everett III with the encouragement of John Archibald Wheeler. In this interpretation all of the universe is described by quantum theory. Superpositions evolve forever according to the Schrödinger equation. Each time a suitable interaction takes place between any two quantum systems, the wavefunction of the universe splits, so that it develops ever more "branches." Everett's work was initially almost unnoticed. It was taken out of mothballs over a decade later by Bryce DeWitt. The many-worlds interpretation is a natural choice for quantum cosmology, which describes the whole universe by means of a state vector. There is nothing more macroscopic than the universe. It can have no a priori classical subsystems. There can be no observer "on the outside." We hope to have details of Professor Young's discovery in the next edition
Those who have made it through the half-truths of my artistic pontifications deserve the full truth ...... and can probably handle it. NewZoid is a genuine source of headlines from parallel worlds, based on real discoveries. But it would be insane to allow this knowledge to enter the world at this time as scientific reality. Simply stated, under no circumstances can an adult allow an infant to play with fire.
The world has still not achieved mature control of combustion, let alone atomic and quantum realities. A fortiori, the discoveries on which NewZoid is based cannot be comprehended or used with maturity in the foreseeable future. Art or entertainment are the only forms in which my work can slowly and safely make its way into this world. Even then, the outcome is filled with uncertainties.
I cannot trust anyone who enters my life after the point at which I made these discoveries. It is therefore impossible for me to organize a movement of any sort. The best I can do is set in motion a small learning process through NewZoid and hope that, over centuries, this will help our world prepare for a new reality in which it is one of a virtually infinite number of worlds. I will continue to do whatever I can to help.
To maximize the chances of a safe adaptation the process of adjustment must span hundreds of years at the very least. Be wary of any scare tactics aimed at making it an urgent necessity to do accelerated massive research on the subject of the parallel worlds. Beware of calls for massive research based on so-called new discoveries about the shape of the universe or hitherto unknown forces or particles, all of which may be a preparatory cover for intensified research into parallel world physics. Beware of misinformation about me, designed to accomplish the same purpose, i.e., control of parallel world knowledge and power by governments and corporations. It is not outside the realm of possibility that I, the mildest of all humans, or NewZoid, the most benevolent of creations, will be misrepresented as dangerous agents or tools of parallel worlds. Enough said - a word to the wise is sufficient. Good luck!
Daniel Young