After looking up R. Kelly and “Trapped in the Closet” on Wikipedia, I began to understand more of what was going on in Michael Bell-Smith’s compilation. The video layered the first five chapters over each other and played them all at once, which as many other people have said was very confusing and disorienting. However, I thought it was interesting that, though there were five layers in the piece the audio did not sound all that bad, more akin to singing in a round than anything else (though the exact words were, for the most part, lost). This is of course very similar to Benglis’ Now, though I felt this involved less confusion, perhaps because of the words being unintelligible (which perhaps has more to do with Serra’s Boomerang, as the audio distortion in that is even more prevalent).
The video was also a compression of all the videos into one screen, which was interesting when juxtaposed next to the Super Mario Clouds piece which did just the opposite by striping away the elements and layers of the game and leaving it with just the clouds. Thus in these two works we are presented with two ends of the spectrum of appropriation: both the simplification and convoluting of existing material.
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