Natural Car Alarms is a project consisting of three cars rigged with modified car alarms whose typical six-tone siren has been replaced with a similar one made only of bird calls. Some of the bird sounds are shockingly electronic in character; others are very bird-like in the quality of their sound, but very alarm-like in their patterning. The idea for the project was in fact the result of a misunderstanding — I heard a bird in the jungles of Trinidad that I mistook for a car alarm — and the project took up the severely urban car alarm as an element that was in fact completely natural to the Long Island City landscape, where the piece (commissioned by SculptureCenter) was exhibited several times in summer and fall of 2002.