Art History and Visual Culture Program Presents
Evangelos Kotsioris
Princeton University
3:10 pm – 4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The SAGE System was a network of computerized situation rooms that started being developed around 1952 and was fully deployed by 1963 across North America. It was one of the vastest, costliest and most technically advanced military-industrial endeavors in post-WWII United States. Initiated as a state-of-the-art air surveillance and early warning system, it was used by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) until 1984. The main purpose for the SAGE System was to provide an effective, semi-automated method to continuously scan the skies for approaching long-range enemy bombers—essentially Soviet ones.
Transmediality—or the coproduction of narrative across multiple media—is here utilized to theorize the ways in which architecture simultaneously constructs and organizes meaning by way of multiple information channels. The SAGE system is, thus, investigated through a methodical examination of: its physical objecthood and technical make-up; its dissemination through mass media; and its multiple afterlives as architectural, technological and visual trope. The physical architecture of the SAGE System undoubtedly organized relationships between human subjects and intricate pieces of electronic equipment. But as a distributed transmedia construct, SAGE also organized a heterogeneous number of linked-up media across which it participated as both container and content.
For more information, call 845-758-4388, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 3:10 pm – 4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Campus Center, Weis Cinema