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.

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.