LONG ISLAND CITY, NEW YORK.- SculptureCenter announces Natural Car Alarms, a migrating public art project by Nina Katchadourian, on view throughout Long Island City, Queens from June 29, 2002 through November 30, 2002. Natural Car Alarms is a small fleet of cars that are outfitted with alarms that have been modified to play bird songs when triggered. Each car will be equipped with a system of birdcalls that mimic the typical six-tone mechanized sound pattern it replaces.

The cars will travel as a flock, migrating to various locations around Long Island City throughout the summer and fall. The Natural Car Alarms flock will debut on June 29th from 10 am to 10 pm at Queens Boulevard & 33rd Street across from MOMA QNS. It will journey to Jackson Avenue and 45th Road near PS 1 on June 30 again on July 20. Visitors to Socrates Sculpture Park will find them near the intersection of Broadway and Vernon Boulevard on September 22nd. The flock of Natural Car Alarms will alight on Purves Street outside the SculptureCenter building when it opens in November 2002. Additional dates and locations may be added. With this new project, Katchadourian builds on a body of work that interacts with systems and patterns in nature. The flock of Natural Car Alarms loosely mimics the social and migratory behavior of birds and suggests an equivalency between birdcalls and car alarms. Car alarms are triggered so regularly and have become such a familiar and "natural" part of the urban soundscape that they have ceased to have much meaning for us. With this work, Katchadourian transposes sounds and their references calling into question what we consider natural and how we ascribe meaning to sound.

Last summer, the artist Nina Katchadourian was hiking in the jungle in Trinidad and heard a birdcall that she thought she recognized. Eventually it occurred to her that the birdcall was strikingly similar to a particular segment of a multi-sound car alarm heard regularly on the streets of New York.

According to Katchadourian, "Car alarms actually have a strangely natural aspect, the same way that the bird in Trinidad took on ’unnatural’ associations for me when I heard it. I’m interested in opening up other possible sound associations in the aural landscape of the city so that sounds and their meanings get a little more slippery."

Born in Stanford, CA in 1968, Katchadourian is based in New York. Her recent exhibitions include solo shows at Hudson Show Room at ArtPace (San Antonio, TX 2002); ACC Galerie (Weimar, Germany 2002); and, Debs & Co (New York, NY 2001). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Greater New York at PS 1 (New York, NY 2000); The Greenhouse Effect, Serpentine Gallery (London, England 2000); and, Anywhere But Here, Artists Space, (New York, NY 2000).

This project is funded in part by a grant from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and by individual contributions. Archival research and assistance was provided by Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.