A tale of two SAICs:

Creating artwork or weapons of mass destruction

written and illustrated by Robyn Coffey

While F News was hard at work on the April issue, one of our staff members mentioned off-handedly that he’d heard SAIC mentioned on independant radio station Democracy Now. Turns out they were discussing not the School of the Art Institute, but a California-based Fortune 500 company called Science Applications International Corporation (www.saic.com), the nation’s largest employee-owned R & D firm. This SAIC, besides engaging in “biopharmaceutical and medical research, robotics, and more,” is helping the federal government support the War on Terror with its specially developed methods, “from geospatial information and signals intelligence to data mining software and visualization tools.”

Unfortunately, according to liberal forum thinkprogress.org, SAIC fell a little short of their long-winded goals. Many of their multi-million dollar federal projects went bust, including new anti-terrorism software for the FBI and a post-Saddam television network in Iraq, for which the corporation refused to pay for presentable clothing for their underpaid news anchors from the waist down.

Which got F News thinking: If massive corporations with revenues in the billions regularly screw up something as simple as a television news broadcast, what wonder could be imagined by the most expensively trained, elite young art students in the country?

F News gives you: What the hell would happen if the School of the Art Institute became a defense contractor.

APRIL 2006