Art: A glorious installation in an eccentric garage
Rich Loen's collection of bells is a wonder of science, tech and imagination
I found a glorious work of art the other day, and it left me breathless, as great art should. It left me feeling somehow cleansed. I felt its physical power, its deeply satisfying blend of technologies both ancient and cutting edge. It is called, simply, Data Bells, and it will be a feature installation at Ottawa Nuit Blanche 2026 in September.
Data Bells was created by Rich Loen and his team at his eccentrically brilliant garage studio, Salon des bananes, on Carling Avenue. Data Bells uses 99 individual bells, each controlled by its own computer motherboard and custom programming. This is a lot of connections to keep operational. (I can’t resist saying it: He’s got 99 bells, but a glitch ain’t one.)
The bells are arranged on curved tables around the room. Floor-to-ceiling black gauze screens all from the busy traffic just outside. The room is in twilight. This all helps to create an intimacy with the installation.
Each bell is unique — some are antique, some decorative, some digital — and each strikes on its own schedule to signify, well, something. Each has a small screen in front of it to signify what it measures. A few examples . . .
An antique brass bell, like might be seen on a hotel front desk, is struck by a silicone hand affixed above it, and its screen says, “New star is born.” It rings 411 times per day and each ring represents 1,000,000 new stars.
A small glass bell rings 15 times per minute, each ring representing 10,000 “female orgasms.”
Other bells measure litres of “blood cleaned by kidneys” (1.2 rings per minute), or “videos viewed on TikTok (seven rings per minute, 100,000 views per ring). There are 99 such measures — newspapers circulated, escalator trips taken, Starbucks coffees sold, and many other imaginative and at times whimsical things. A large silver bell measures “Farts in this room” when filled by 100 people. Each ring is one fart. It rings 2,500 times per day. And you thought the car exhaust outside was the problem. (Another bell measures that car exhaust, see photo below.)
This may all sound cacophonous, like walking into a Pink Floyd album, but it is not. Loen programmed the system to randomly assign some rings to create a backing beat, which forms a solid base that makes the unsynchronized ringing of the other bells strangely melodic. It’s as if the vast, randomness of our planet and universe is all in harmony — which, of course, it is, in the sense that we could not otherwise survive on Earth.
What took all of this to another level was when Loen explained that every time they reset the installation the backing beat is randomly different, and the bell assignments are randomly redistributed, so that each of 99 bells measures a different one of 99 topics each time the system is reset. With infinite combinations, every reset is in effect a wholly new combination of rings and notes and, as Loen put it, “The song we’re hearing now has never been heard before and will never be heard again.”
If you see and hear Data Bells it will be different from when I experienced it, and it will be different from what every other person who sees it at another time will see and hear. What all viewers can share is the magnificence of the thing, the feeling of being surrounded and embraced by the thing. It is thoughtful, uplifting and highly entertaining. Fine art can be, and occasionally is, all of those things.
It’s perhaps too late to see Data Bells at Loen’s studio, which is usually open to the public only by appointment, but the relocated installation will be open to all on Sept. 26, when Nuit Blanche returns to take over the ByWard Market and area for one overnight festival of innovative art.
More on that to follow . . .
-30-
Great article. I've seen Data Bells a couple of times and this captured the breadth and scope of it for me.