The “Guitar Hero” clone sitting in the University of Michigan Museum of Art Project Gallery doesn't play “Through the Fire and Flames” or “Sweet Child O’ Mine” or anything even moderately close to rock or heavy metal.

In the gray-carpeted, sterile museum space, there is only one song available to play on the console. The player is given just two notes, which are strummed once and then held over the span of several minutes. The buttons’ sound-trails float ethereally down the screen. A rugged, distorted electric guitar twang resonates in the exhibit space.

The noise becomes increasingly mocking as the player sits, fingers unmoving on the fret board. The game, “Frets on Fire,” racks up points over-enthusiastically: 2,000 then 3,000 and climbing. In this game, any player with fingers and a lick of patience will be guaranteed to end the song with thousands of points and the title of Rock God.

This song, as produced on “Frets on Fire,” is a work titled Composition #7 by Cory Arcangel, whose exhibit, “Cory Arcangel: Creative Pursuits,” is on display at the UMMA Project Gallery through April 11.

Arcangel himself is an artist at the forefront of the contemporary digital and media-based art scene, producing works that use and examine mediums both culturally familiar and unfamiliar: Photoshop, Guitar Hero-type games, the Sony PlayStation, viral videos, Maxell cassette tapes and kinetic sculpture à la ’90s store displays. His works have been lauded by, as well as displayed in, institutions like The Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City .

Like Composition #7, the rest of Arcangel’s body of work currently on display at UMMA analyzes the expanses between concepts commonly seen as disparate — the gray area between high and low culture, the virtuosic and the amateur, the popular and the obscure.

In these in-between spaces, Arcangel finds a way of twisting and playing with conceptions of what art is and how it breaks down. What kind of art “belongs” in a museum and what kind would you find in a working-class living room? Does “Guitar Hero” belong in an art gallery? Does Philip Glass belong in the living room? Are the two groups mutually exclusive?

“(The exhibit) is more of a focus on how expression happens in a particular medium … so all the works you see are pivoted off of traditional ways that these things are traditionally used,” Arcangel said. “I’ll look at the ways people are using things and then look at the medium and then try to find a way in or out of it.”

While it's assumed that “Guitar Hero” is an outlet reserved for popular guitar music, Arcangel’s Composition #7 undermines this concept — Arcangel’s two-note song on "Frets on Fire" is not a haphazard creation, but an actual musical piece titled “Composition 1960 #7,” which was created by renowned composer La Monte Young in the 1960s.

The work itself is composed of only B and F# notes, together creating a perfect fifth. In performance, these notes were, according to Young’s instructions for the piece, to be “held for a long time.”

Using the lens of something as approachable and culturally omnipresent as “Guitar Hero,” Arcangel plays with the audience’s field of interest by mixing the familiar with culturally obscure concept art.

“The pieces present a mix of high and low fashion,” said Jacob Proctor, associate curator of modern and ontemporary art at the UMMA, who also curated Arcangel’s exhibit.

“That kind of mash-up goes back to some of the first steps I’ve ever seen in (Arcangel’s) Beach Boys vs. Geto Boys mash-up,” Proctor said, referring to a 2004 piece in which Arcangel mixed two culturally separate songs.

In that piece, the Beach Boys' sunny rock was not positioned to rile up the aggressive rap of the Geto Boys. Instead, the two groups were integrated with one another into a single track, displaying consistencies beyond the second word in both of the groups’ names.