In a break from its usual programme, which tends to include showings of new work by gallery artists and like-minded contemporaries, the Modern Institute in Glasgow is showing a collection of pieces by Ferdinand Kriwet, the pioneering multi-media artist and poet, best known for his Bild-Ton-Collage, or sound-picture-collages, matching a set of new work with a focused retrospective, sampling the Dusseldorf-born artist's activity in the 1960s.

The show opens with the seminal Apollovision, an attempt to fuse together the media sources Kriwet encountered on a trip to the US during the hubbub surrounding the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Grainy television footage is cut and pasted together, paired with a soundtrack of radio broadcasts, sometimes allowed to flow, at other times cut down to single repeated words and looped announcements, to mesmeric effect.

Kriwet does not limit himself to sounds and images of the Apollo 11 mission, though, also homing in on the advertising slogans of broadcast sponsors (including, neatly enough, Brillo, a brand immortalised by Andy Warhol some five years earlier), allows the quintessentially American Superman through his filter and overlays recorded images with bold-face single-word inter-titles, flashed up for a split second: GAS, LSD, LAW, ORDER, VIET, and so on. The repeated compere's introduction of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and the Apollo astronauts to some celebratory function sees Kriwet complete a complex picture of the moon landing as glorious scientific adventure, all-American hero worship, and advertising-laden victory for capitalist propaganda.

It is this combination of the absorption and presentation of mass media with pointed commentary that allows Kriwet's work to seem absolutely current, even if he is documenting a moment in history, and even if his techniques have been used before and since.

William Burroughs extended his literary cut-up and fold-in experiments to tape, adding a veneer of hokey mysticism to the combination of existing texts and randomly inserted recordings; John Oswald's plunderphonic mangling of hit songs might come laden with theory but remains a one-note joke, like the more recent micro-editing efforts of Cassetteboy, and Double Dee and Steinski's feverish Lessons in the musical heritage of early hip-hop are confined to a single musical scene.

Kriwet stands out from these fellow media collage artists not just for being a pioneer of the form, inspiring those who followed, but because his efforts seem to form a complete, coherent essay, offering a genuine understanding of a period of past time. Those text overlays might hover dangerously close to agitprop, but Kriwet keeps a cool head, engaged in a genuine attempt, like David Bowie's Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, to absorb the welter of images, sounds and texts transmitted over the airwaves.

The merger of the political, populist and commercial continues in a pair of works from 1968, both titled Textsign. Both are stamped in aluminum, their circular texts highlighted in red on a green background, with the look of shop signs or advertising hoardings, and both contain sets of elided words, fusing celebrities with allied or unexpected concepts, new coinages that prompt dense sets of images. Marlonesome fuses Brando with Elvis, retrospectively doubling the fame-inspired reclusive nature of both men. Robertarzan does a similar job on RFK and the King of the Apes. The more cryptic texts - Hemancipate, Jungleleisure, Mentalamode - seem in hindsight to presage the absurd attempts of today's advertisers and political pollsters to slice and dice demographic groups, from Soccer Moms to Fifty Quid Blokes.

The 10 prints that make up Rundscheiben - literally, Round Discs - are not so easy to read. Each one is like a little big bang, with letters, words and phrases spinning out from an empty core. A bid to disrupt the usually linear progress of writing, these are not quite concrete poems (the circular display of words does not seem to enhance their meaning) but build a rhythm through juxtaposition, as in the print which lays meaningless syllables - "Stot, kin, tin . . ." - around lengthy, complex compound nouns.

Kriwet changes tack with the recent series Trans-Script. While still working with language and text, his focus seems to have shifted even further towards the means of transmission, in this case the book. Three museum-like cabinets are set in the centre of the Modern Institute's main gallery space, each bearing "book objects", open for perusal, but under glass.

Beneath the exposed editions are more of the same, but boxed and placed with some reverence on a set of shelves, accompanied by a stern warning that visitors should not touch them. Instead, the books - perfectly bound, with rather lavish interleaves protecting each photo-copied page of often illegible text formations - can be read on a set of video monitors hung on the opposite wall.

This is no interactive installation to flick through, though, with Kriwet testing the viewer's patience by screening each page of each book in turn, including those blank transparent leaves. It's a strangely fetishistic installation, the complex, almost unfriendly archival presentation serving to shift focus away from the content of the books, offering them up instead as artefacts to be considered. The presence of texts mediated via digital media hints that Kriwet might be considering the future of the book as a medium, a dystopian future where they are not objects from which knowledge can be gleaned, but relics to be studied at one remove, scanned and displayed on screens.

By way of contrast, a much more generous 1967 work hangs beside the Trans-Script display. This poem-painting has white text in a friendly serif display font set against a black background, the letters butting right up against the frame, as if the work has been cut from a longer dialogue. As it is, the poem consists of a single word: Du. After the cool, stand-offish installation that dominates the room, this short welcome comes as something of a relief.

This is a concise show of just eight works, then, but it is just as satisfying as any full retrospective, offering a snapshot of Kriwet's 1960s work, while revealing the breadth of his ongoing practice, from the early, influential multimedia collage experimentation of Apollovision to the fusion of print and digital media of the Trans-Script installation.

Ferdinand Kriwet is at the Modern Institute, Glasgow, until June 14.