Hell Is Empty (2017-2019)

Performance interface
Live performance (FIBER festival, Amsterdam, 05-17)
Installation (Tongue Fest, Glasgow, 09-17)
Cassette release (VIS, 03-18)
Installation (The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow, 11-18)
Live performance (UNFIX, CCA Glasgow, 03-19)
Audio/visual installation and performance piece for projection, speakers, light sensing cameras and live data

Hell Is Empty is an audio visual installation and performance piece that uses modern alchemical means to attempt to transmute the basest material possible into gold. Taking as its source the basest raw cultural material available – in this case the content, code and graphics of the lowest-common-denominator / alt-right spawning / ignorance-promoting / intolerance-supporting news website Breitbart.com – the piece uses all the constituent parts of the site to break it down into something more palatable. The php code of the site was scraped and converted into raw data to generate audio information; numbers from within the code were assigned to midi information to create musical patterns; articles from the site are read dispassionately before being broken down into something akin to glossolalia (speaking in tongues), which some consider to be the true treasure of the Templars, a true universal language; and finally, the visual imagery of the site is broken down during browsing using an algorithm taking data from the code of the site itself. During the performance, data is taken live from the site itself and manipulated in real time, whilst light sensitive cameras use the light and motion of the degenerating video – and the participants and audience’s own movements – to control and generate further audio.”








>Ruaridh Law is an artist and musician based in North Ayrshire, Scotland.

>Over 20 years he has performed in groups, in collaborations and solo across a wide range of festivals, arts spaces, venues and clubs as performer, improviser, DJ and artist. His >mediums include sound and installation art, film and writing. His works have ranged from intimate audio performance and gallery installations to large-scale outdoor works >combining sound walks, improvised performance and experimental storytelling.

>His artistic focusses are on data-visualisation, human voices and their stories, unusual paradigms for performance and composing, and marrying abstraction to a beating human >heart. These have manifested themselves in a tarot deck that generates music, sequential stories told over film and radio, right-wing propaganda twisted and sanitised into more >worthwhile content and a walk through a forest and its imagined mythologies in the dead of night – as well as countless CD, DVD, vinyl and other music releases.

>He runs several record labels and, more recently, No Roof Only Sky, a small press publisher.