Eye-frazzlers

The old observatory on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill may be the most favourably positioned art venue in the world. Recently resurrected by a group called Collective, the space, with its panoramic views and Enlightenment history, is an ambitious and imaginative addition to Edinburgh’s art scene.

In their Hillside gallery there’s a firing-range warning sign on the screen, a few seconds of stillness and silence, then a sudden machine-gun rattle. The sound is revealed to be a stick, dragged by a child along corrugated iron, and the juxtaposition is the strongest moment in Helen McCrorie’s portentously titled video work, ‘If play is neither inside nor outside, where is it?’ (until 6 October). The film shifts between lingering shots of children, poking sticks, hiding, climbing and wandering, and occasional glimpses of a data storage unit that is under construction beside the children’s outdoor playgroup, at a former MoD prisoner-of-war camp near Comrie in Perthshire. We’re meant to see a link between the ‘data gathering’ of undirected play and the faceless toil of humming computer servers. But it’s obscure and never quite moves beyond the observational.

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The best video and sound stuff at this year’s festival is at the new Edinburgh Printmakers. ‘Deer Dancer’ is a perfectly pitched work by Hanna Tuulikki, shown (until 6 October) on two opposing screens and set to a bewitching and acutely atavistic sound track of thud and song and whoop. On screen, the artist, in a succession of fabulous costumes, plays multiple deer-inflected roles, dancing out a perfectly choreographed, rhythmic tale of hunt and kill. The antler headdresses, golden breastplates and furred codpieces add a layer of masculine idiocy to this Romano-Celtic pantomime. This is a confident, elegantly produced and richly layered work that translates something elemental about nature and ritual without ever edging towards the bombastic.