On Sept. 20, a new immersive art experience–Databells–will be unveiled at Salon Des Bananes. I talked to artist Rich Loen and got a sneak preview of Databells.
What is the Databells experience exactly?
You walk into a large, dimly lit gallery space. Throughout the room, there are beautiful curved black tables that invite you to walk around them. Individual accent lights illuminate a huge variety of bells standing on the tables around the room. The bells range from teeny tiny to massive church bell size.
As you enter further into the room, the bells begin to ring in an eerie sort of song. Walking up to the bells and examining the labels on each of them gives you a hint as to what is going on. Each bell is mechanically chimed at a fixed rate, which is correlated to a specific statistic. Number of Starbucks coffees sold. Number of pets adopted in Canada. Number of people killed by snakes.
Databells at Salon des Bananes. Photo by Bruce Burwell.
The installation works on multiple levels. The gloomy room with spotlit bells is visually appealing. The random bell song is otherworldly. The statistics are pretty cool. And the bells themselves are fascinating. It’s like you’ve accidentally stumbled into a National Bell Museum, only with music.
“The bells start slowly and then build into song. And we don’t know the song. We haven’t written it, no one has. Because every bell is ringing to a piece of data that’s happening somewhere in the world right now. And it’s somewhat random how the data is assigned to the bells. So every time the song runs, it’s different,” Loen says.
He says the bells are synchronized by ringing for things happening in the world, but they’ve “added a beat mechanism to it.”
“They do follow a beat, and they are ringing the right number of times per minute, and so it’s a way of visualizing data and things that are happening in the world.”
The statistics come from a database the gallery has been building, Loen says.
“We’ve been building a database for years of facts and statistics and most of the information is estimated data. And we try to find information that is poignant and information that is fun. We have the statistics about how in a room of a hundred people, how often is someone going to fart?”
The bells come from all over the world, which Loen says was a “big part of the project.”
“We got yak bells to cowbells to church bells. We have a bell that we kind of rescued from a school that was being torn down and they looked at it as a piece of junk. So we bought it.”
Loen also told me a bit about the importance and the origin of the bells in Databells.
“Bells are cross-cultural. Every country has them, and bells have meaning,” he says. “There are happy bells for weddings, there are alarm bells for firetrucks. At the change of a class, the end of a period in school there is a bell. It’s always with some kind of bell.”
Databells is at Salon Des Bananes, 2207 Carling Ave., Thursdays to Sundays from 10am-3pm from Sept. 25 to Oct. 17. Registration is free and available here.
On Saturday, Sept. 20, there is an opening night vernissage from 6-10pm. Apart from Databells, there will be jazz music, catering, drinks and a special unveiling. Tickets are $73.45 and can be purchased here.
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