Browsing by Author "Mody, Cyrus C.M."

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    'A Towering Virtue of Necessity': Interdisciplinarity and the Rise of Computer Music at Vietnam-Era Stanford
    (University of Chicago Press, 2013) Mody, Cyrus C.M.; Nelson, Andrew J.
    Stanford, more than most American universities, transformed in the early Cold War into a research powerhouse tied to national security priorities. The budgetary and legitimacy crises that beset the military- industrial- academic research complex in the 1960s thus struck Stanford so deeply that many feared the university itself might not survive. We argue that these crises facilitated the rise of a new kind of interdisciplinarity at Stanford, as evidenced in particular by the founding of the university’s computer music center. Focusing on the “multivocal technology” of computer music, we investigate the relationships between Stanford’s broader institutional environment and the interactions among musicians, engineers, administrators, activists, and funders in order to explain the emergence of one of the most creative and profi table loci for Stanford’s contributions to industry and the arts.
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    Failures to Compute
    (AAAS, 2013) Mody, Cyrus C.M.
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    From Materials Science to Nanotechnology: Institutions, Communities, and Disciplines at Cornell University, 1960-2000
    (University of California Press, 2013) Choi, Hyungsub; Mody, Cyrus C.M.
    During the last several decades, interdisciplinary research centers have emerged as a standard, powerful tool for federal funding of university research. This paper contends that this organizational model can be traced to the ‘‘Interdisciplinary Laboratories’’ program funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1960. The novelty of the IDL program was that it created a peer group of university laboratories with sustained funding to ensure their institutional stability. The Cornell Materials Science Center, one of the first three Interdisciplinary Laboratories, served as a breeding ground for a new community of engineering faculty members, who subsequently helped establish a series of interdisciplinary research centers at Cornell, including the National Research and Resource Facility for Submicron Structures (or National Submicron Facility) in 1977. The Materials Science Center and National Submicron Facility provided explicit models for the expansion and coordination of networks of interdisciplinary centers, both within single universities (such as Cornell) and across multiple campuses (through programs such as the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network and the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers). The center model has proved both flexible and durable in the face of changing demands on universities. By examining the Materials Science Center and the National Submicron Facility, we show that recent institutional developments perceived as entirely novel have their roots in the high Cold War years.
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    Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
    (Sage, 2015) Howe, Cymene; Lockrem, Jessica; Appel, Hannah; Hackett, Edward; Boyer, Dominic; Hall, Randal; Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew; Pope, Albert; Gupta, Akhil; Rodwell, Elizabeth; Ballestero, Andrea; Durbin, Trevor; el-Dahdah, Farès; Long, Elizabeth; Mody, Cyrus C.M.; Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences
    In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.
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    Santa Barbara, Physics, and the Long 1970s
    (American Institute of Physics, 2013-09) Mody, Cyrus C.M.
    The adaptations of a group of Southern California physicists to the trying conditions of the 1970s anticipated some of the important 21st-century trends in the discipline.