When Rich Loen took over a tire shop at an unremarkable corner of west-end Ottawa in 2019, he was thrilled to have a big sign out front — and even more tickled to find the box of letters that clicked into it.
It meant the retired tech entrepreneur could spell out any message that caught his fancy, and it would be visible to the traffic on that busy stretch of
Carling Avenue near Woodroffe
. With an eye-catching yellow banana on top, the Loen Design sign is hard to miss.
Loen’s first message under the banana threw back to the early days of programming: “Hello World,” he wrote, introducing his new chapter with the phrase programmers traditionally use to test programs.
The sign sparked a ripple of interest on social media, and Loen ran with it, changing the message regularly. Some of the highlights of recent months have included “Ew, people,” “A lot depends on everything” and “Hang on. Let me overthink this.” One entry was a chemical formula.
Passers-by were amused at the unexpected humour popping up on their commute, expressing their appreciation on Reddit and other social media sites.
“We started that sign when we moved in, so for five years I’ve been changing it every two weeks,” Loen said, “and none of the messages have any agenda. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, they’re just little quirky fun things. People love it.”
The sign marks the location of Loen’s art studio, Salon des Bananes, a 7,000-square-foot space that includes a spacious gallery, a huge workshop with machines for woodworking and metal work, plus back rooms for storage, one with a row of 3D printers, and an office upstairs.
Some of Loen’s functional creations are on display, including a 20-foot table, which is actually a coffee table with 20 legs, each one standing in a tiny red Converse sneaker.
In the middle of the gallery room is a battered wooden door that opens to one of his most ambitious projects, an installation he calls Databells. It will be open to the public from Sept. 25 to Oct. 17.
Loen presses the doorbell and opens the door. We step into a darkened room that’s filled with bells, each one installed on a tabletop with a robotic device to ring it and a digital placard bearing a statistic. One bell rings for every star born in our galaxy, for example, or every time someone dies due to smoking. Another bell chimes whenever a newspaper is delivered.
Some of the bells are ringing steadily, while others are more sporadic. There are about 100 bells from around the world, each one different, the sounds ranging from the urgent gong of a Lanark schoolhouse bell to the cheery jingle of silver bells. The stats change each time the door opens, triggering a unique composition with every visit.
The overall effect is a fascinating symphony of clangs, dings and dongs, but with a subtle beat that gives it a rhythmic shape. You can simply stand and listen, or dive into the stats on each placard, which also measure oddities like the average number of farts in a room or male orgasms. No less mesmerizing is the constant movement of the modified drum pedals programmed to strike the bells.
Databells is the result of several years of programming, wiring and invention, not to mention collecting the bells and building a database of statistics. It’s exactly the kind of tech-informed artwork that fills Loen’s active mind.
“It’s not a project the average artist could take on,” he said. “It’s absolutely art and it’s absolutely filled with feeling and meaning and all these things, but it has a major technical component to it.”
He explains how each bell has a “little computer” underneath it, with a custom board and circuitry to control the bell and sensor. Those inner workings are neatly tucked into long, curved tables that were also made in-house. Loen’s team includes two recent grads, an industrial designer and a software engineer.
So, who is Richard Loen? The lanky, blue-eyed 65-year-old is the oldest of two boys born to a National Research Council engineer and his wife. The family lived in the Gloucester neighbourhood, and the boys attended Gloucester High School.
Young Rich was curious and showed an ability to build anything at an early age. According to family lore, at the age of four, he took a lawnmower apart in the workshop, then rebuilt it the following spring and mowed the lawn.
Growing up, the Loen brothers were always tinkering with things, and their dad encouraged them. Loen recalls one time he and his brother were building a rocket engine in the driveway.
“We were trying to blow gasoline through this thing and then get it to ignite,” he said. “We were standing in the driveway in puddles of gasoline and sort of putting out the extra flames with our feet, and my dad came out and looked at what we were doing and he goes, ’Well, you don’t have anywhere near enough air flow.’ That’s the kind of dad he was.”
Rich started his first business in high school, a DJ service called Soundwaves Electronics, which grew to include multiple sound systems and DJs, and helped fund his engineering studies at Carleton University. Before graduating in 1979, he also founded a company that provided sound and lights for rock concerts.
Loen jokes that he’s never had a full-time job in his life, although he’s launched about a dozen businesses.
In 1998, he was named Young Entrepreneur of the Year by the Ottawa-Carleton Board of Trade, which listed his company, InGenius Engineering, founded in 1986, as a systems integration and technical recruitment firm.
While consulting for Ottawa tech companies, Loen met Dale Gantous, the woman in charge of software development at Telesat. When she was laid off in a company restructuring in the early 90s, he scooped her up to be CEO of InGenius. The couple eventually married and had twin boys, who are now 22.
By the year 2000, Loen was swept up in the race to get video on the Internet. He and Gantous founded an offshoot company, sofTV.net, that was one of the first to develop software to stream video. They were excited about the potential, according to coverage in this newspaper.
“We allow everything that you could have in, say, a news, financial, or sports area on the page, with that information constantly being updated while you’re watching the video. This is absolutely earth-shattering in a world involving the Web, TV and streaming video,” he told a Citizen reporter at the time.
Co-founder Gantous was bullish on the burgeoning industry, too: ‘It’s like the early days of Hollywood because it’s the start of a whole new revolutionary mass media,” she was quoted as saying.
Over the years, the couple’s business affairs shifted to focus on InGenius. They developed software to streamline work in call centres, which was adopted by some of the world’s biggest companies. In 2019, they
sold InGenius to a Texas-based company for almost $30 million
and retired.
Loen says he “sat around for half an hour” and then sprang into action, making lists of everything he wanted in a workshop/studio and the projects he wanted to tackle.
“What I’ve been trying to do is kind of change things in the Ottawa art world a little bit,” he said, “you know, just sort of bring it a breath of fresh air. And I’m lucky with my situation that I can do this. I can take over a building. I can just go crazy.”
As for the sign out front, there’s little danger of running out of ideas. Loen says he’s compiled a folder of more than 100 messages to choose from.
“I like creating these things that bring a smile to people’s faces, and have an air of mystery and fun and intrigue,” he said. “Like when people are driving by, they don’t know what’s going on in this weird grey building, but they’re all curious. They see the sign and when we do a show and people come in, they’re just astonished and loving what we do here. I love that.”
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