TJ Shin at Los Angeles State Historic Park, Presented by Clockshop

TJ Shin, Songs of Emerging Endangerment (installation view), Los Angeles State Historic Park (2025). Public sound installation, duration: variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Clockshop. Photo: Josh Schaedel.

The soundscape of Los Angeles State Historic Park has always been punctuated by birdsong. Likely thanks to House Finches and hawks, all of the sounds can be heard over the clank of the Chinatown Metrolink and the music of outdoor Zumba. But since last October, new warbles have emerged every hour from sunrise to sunset. If you’ve recently visited this reclaimed railyard at the edge of the L.A. River, you may have thought these chirps were birds. You’d have no reason to suspect that these sounds are actually human voices blaring from an air-raid siren.

This is Songs of Emerging Endangerment (2025), a sound installation by Los Angeles-based artist TJ Shin, commissioned by Clockshop. Walk past the kite-flyers, duck beneath the pedestrian overpass, and you’ll see it: a 30-foot tall metal pole with a rusty cage at its top. This is a birdhouse siren, also known as a Federal Signal Model 5. Installed throughout L.A. during the 1940s and 50s, these sirens were designed to alert the public to an approaching aerial enemy from the Pacific. They became ubiquitous during the Cold War and World War II—the Federal Civil Defense Administration conducted air-raid drills throughout L.A. County once a month until 1985. These drills trained Angelenos to live under the assumption of perpetual threat.

Shin’s air-raid siren amplifies the human imitations of 15 endangered bird species from the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, a migratory corridor spanning from New Zealand to Siberia that encompasses what was once thought of as enemy territory—Korea, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, the USSR. Shin enlisted Angelenos descended from these territories to mimic calls culled from field recordings. A second group then mimicked the recordings of the first, a type of sonic reproduction that echoes a heritage of migration. It is ironic that Shin projects these recordings via military alarm; attempting to identify the enemy in these tweets is a ludicrous task.

I did not recognize any of Shin’s birdcalls, despite the siren’s uncanny clarity. And yet, its chirps and whoops—some brief, some lasting for several minutes—blended with the park’s organic soundscape. If the shrill call of the original siren was meant to instill fear, these imitations engender a sense of natural calm, even curiosity. When Shin lets “the enemy” sing for themselves, unmediated by civil defense narratives, their songs become another harmony sung by migrants in a city of migrants.

So, who is attacking from the sky? Shin’s siren forces us to listen to the cries of living beings we ourselves have threatened through American military intervention…those ecologies—avian and human—devastated by nuclear and chemical warfare throughout the Pacific Rim. Today, this ecological devastation goes beyond the Pacific. In a nation turning its hungry gaze toward Venezuelan oil fields, Greenlandic mineral rights, and Palestinian land (all while demonizing migrants as an existential threat), our colonial project continues to rely on a manufactured fear of enemies—enemies we create out of thin air.

TJ Shin, Songs of Emerging Endangerment (installation view), Los Angeles State Historic Park (2025). Public sound installation, duration: variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Clockshop. Photo: Josh Schaedel.

TJ Shin, Songs of Emerging Endangerment (installation view), Los Angeles State Historic Park (2025). Public sound installation, duration: variable. Image courtesy of the artist and Clockshop. Photo: Josh Schaedel.

TJ Shin: Songs of Emerging Endangerments runs from October 25, 2025 – February 22, 2026 at Los Angeles Historic State Park.

Sean Koa Seu is a writer, dramaturg, and critic. He writes about representations of the Southland in art, film, and literature. His work has appeared in The Rebis and in zine form at the L.A. Art Book Fair. He is currently pursuing an MA in Aesthetics and Politics at CalArts.

More by Sean Koa Seu