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.