stage designer since the War Tour of 1982–1983. In place of U2's austere and minimalist productions of the 1980s, the Zoo TV stage was a complex setup, designed to instill "sensory overload" in its audience. The set's giant video screens showed footage of the band members performing, pre-recorded video, live television transmissions, and flashing text phrases. Electronic, tabloid-style headlines ran on scrawls at the ends of the stage. The band's embracing of such technology was meant as a radical departure in form, and as a commentary on the pervasive nature of technology. This led many critics to describe the show as ironic. To enable such a complex video production, the equivalent of a television studio control room was built for the tour. Williams enlisted Carol Dodds to be video director based on their experience together on Bowie's Sound+Vision Tour and her familiarity with Vidiwalls from a Paula Abdul tour. Dodds operated the tour's "custom-designed interactive video system", and oversaw a crew ranging from 12 people on the arena legs to 18 for the "Outside Broadcast" leg. At the front of house position, the video crew conducted a live mix of the broadcast cameras filming the concert and live television transmissions intercepted by a satellite dish. In the production facility underneath the stage, dubbed "Underworld", engineers intercut the video from the live mix with pre-recorded imagery from LaserDisc players, video tape players, and a Philips CD-i player and routed it to the display screens. In all, content was compiled from 24 different video sources. Personal computers were used to sequence specific pre-recorded video segments and distribute them to the proper outputs; the engineers could select one or many displays to which to output each content source, whether it be a single video cube or an entire screen. The computers' media controls allowed video content from the disc and tape players, either individual frames or entire segments, to be sequenced, looped, and built into pre-programmed cues. On stage, guitarist the Edge used MIDI pedals to trigger music sequencers, generating SMPTE timecode for coordinating the video cues. Des Broadberry managed the keyboards, sequencers, samples, and MIDI equipment. Despite the production's complexity, the group decided that flexibility in the shows' length and content was a priority. The Edge said, "That was one of the more important decisions we made early on, that we wouldn't sacrifice flexibility, so we designed a system that is both