I’m Tara Shanahan and I’m majoring in Strategic Design and Management at Parsons. I was at Lang majoring in Contemporary Music for two years before this. So although it’s my first year at Parsons, my first year is different than most people. I had to take some basic requirements, but a lot of my credits actually transferred over. My courses this year have been Critical Studio (a combined studio and seminar class for people who are BAFA or transfers), Sustainable Systems, Time: Embodied, Quantitative Reasoning II, History of Design Lecture and Recitation, Managing Creative Teams, Marketing, PR, and Branding, and Studio and Seminar 2.
An overarching theme throughout most of my work surrounds feminism and music. I’ve been DJing since I was 16 and it plays a big role in my life. I’ve also been working in music since I was 10 and that has it’s advantages and disadvantages. I made a turntable for my sustainable systems class. I did a project about DJing and the body for Time. I made 4 books about club culture for my Critical Studio class. Finally, my website/interactive timeline of women in electronic music and my paper on Johanna Beyer. I tried new things too though. I built a website with Adobe Muse and made earrings for the first time for History of Design. So I also allowed myself to play with new mediums. It’s inevitable that courses will overlap and ideas for one thing will generate for another because that’s just how our brains work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_REVFN7A6_4
My connection between my studio and seminar project is directly related. I discovered Johanna Beyer, while I was doing research for my studio and one thing just lead to another from there. I could honestly spend years making that timeline. I had to keep narrowing my topic because I kept finding so many. I want to continue it though so we’ll see. I think it’s a really important thing to have an archive of women’s history. When I was filling out the timeline I found that as soon as the project would start to drag, I’d get really inspired again by some female electronic artist and be sucked back in. Doing the paper on Johanna Beyer, I exhausted the minimal resources I had, but that was exactly the point of my paper because I wanted to know why this was and what I could gather from what was left. Her manuscripts are all at the New York Public Library so I got to go see them. There physically isn’t any other research on her and there isn’t anything I haven’t read.
http://unsung.businesscatalyst.com
I definitely want to continue to pursue feminism and music, I can’t imagine not doing that. There are actually a lot of different facets that go into it because it’s not only from an artist perspective, but from the women who work behind the scenes.
