My first visit to the Spacex Gallery has left me with mixed feelings. Cory Arcangel’s exhibition was half amazing, half awful.

To start with the amazing bit: a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould is the reason I went to Spacex to start with. Two large video screens play Arcangel’s version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a loop. Sit there with your eyes closed, and it’s just another version of the piece. Listen with more than just your ears and you appreciate how incredibly clever it is. Taking bits from thousands of amateur music videos on YouTube, Arcangel has spliced together note after note to create a musically coherent version of the score.

The clips include performances from amateur musicians, children, cats, a robot and even a hamster. Each screen carries a melody line, and the images therefore change at the speed of the music. This makes for an interesting viewing experience, because your eyes find it far harder to keep up with what your ears accept happily.

Unfortunately, after being so impressed with a couple thousand films, the rest of the exhibition was somewhat disappointing. I Shot Andy Warhol is a hacked Nintendo game, in which players are asked to use the light gun to shoot an image of artist Andy Warhol, while avoiding the Pope, Colonel Sanders (the KFC man) and Flavor Flav (Public Enemy rapper). Amusing idea, but not able to hold my interest for more than about two seconds.

Colors, the next piece, is a similarly intriguing idea but doesn’t particularly engage the viewer. A computer plays one line of pixels from the 1987 cop drama Colors at a time, with additional lines appearing as the programme progresses over the course of 33 days. The soundtrack plays simultaneously, apparently allowing visitors to follow the plot, but as the headphones were not working when I visited, I have no idea how this works. Is the soundtrack similarly slow? Does it matter? And given the complete dislocation of image from sound (and the fact that the only image you see is a series of colourful lines), is there much point in the Certificate 18 warning given in the exhibition programme? Still, an unusual and interesting concept.

The installations Two Keystone Projectors and Sans Simon were in a room together. The first consists of two projectors, a VCR and the wall on which overlapping blue and purple squares are projected. The second is a video of Simon & Garfunkel playing The Sound of Silence, filmed from Arcangel’s television with the addition of his hand over Paul Simon’s face to ‘remove’ him from the recording – “an ultra low-tech approach to video editing,” says the exhibition programme. While with the Colors and Andy Warhol installations the ideas were interesting even if there was not much depth, this room just left me confused.

I recommend the exhibition nonetheless, if only for a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould. If you get any more from the rest of it, let me know.

Cory Arcangel exhibition running until 23 February. Free admission.
Spacex, 45 Preston Street, 01392 431786, www.spacex.org.uk

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Alona Simister