THESE days, the "digital revolution" is so much a part of life that it's easy to forget how dramatic a sea-change it has been. It's only when you see a digital film projected side-by-side with a crackly, faded Super8 one, as you do in this fascinatin
g retrospective of the films of Langlands & Bell at Edinburgh University's Talbot Rice Gallery, that the starkness of the contrast is revealed.
That's not to say that one is always better than the other. A number of artists opt to use traditional film for aesthetic reasons. Langlands & Bell, however, are always keen to explore the cutting edge of technology. Just as Super8 was a challenge 30 years ago, now they are embracing the challenges of web-based and interactive media.
Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell have been a partnership, personally and professionally, since the late 1970s. They are best known for sculptural work, often using architectural models, but film has always been a key part of their practice. They describe it as their "sketchbook", a way of recording immediate observations and ideas, which are later painstakingly edited.
As a result, their films have an immediate quality, a keen sense of place and an eye for the unexpected which illuminates the ordinary. Borough Market was made in 1986, when the covered market south of the Thames was a wholesale fruit and veg market, rather than the Mecca for organic shoppers it is today.
It weaves together a day in the life of the area, from the fruit barrows being loaded at dawn to the army of suited commuters coming home across the Thames in the evening, regularly punctuated by the rattling of passing trains. The camera continually picks out engaging details: the cat perched on a trader's desk, the similarities between the local faces and those of the paintings in Southwark Cathedral.
There is a remarkable continuity of that aesthetic in the newest film here, Folkestone – Boulogne: A Blind Date, made earlier this year for the Folkestone Triennial. The artists travelled by ship between the two cities, observing with the same warmly interested eye, whether their subject is a Boulogne fisherman rapping about the woes of his industry or the patient engagement of Folkestone's volunteer "coast watchers". Again there is a perceptive mixture of panorama and detail: a decaying stucco house front; a wrinkled face behind a fruit and veg stall.
This is the first time Langlands & Bell's films have been brought together in a single exhibition and it is possible to trace this strand even in their earliest works, The Kitchen, made in 1978 when they were art students together at Middlesex Polytechnic and Ooh La La Les Legumes, made on the streets of Dijon a year later. All reflect an interest in the built environment and how it becomes imbued with the people who live there, a fascination with the juxtaposition of images and ideas, and how the present is connected to the past.
Pseudo (1980) is a tribute to an earlier era of film-making, on one level a knowing pastiche of Hitchcock's Psycho, but also an atmospheric, noirish mind-game: is the glamorous protagonist watching an intruder on television, or is he breaking in to her house as we watch?
These films are still compelling after 30 years. What occasionally grates for the modern audience is not the film quality but the decision to add elements of electronic music – often composed by friends – over the soundtrack of "natural" sounds. A faded film adds a texture of its own, but there is no disguising a 1980s synthesiser.
The digital animations, which reflect the pair's interest in signs, logos and acronyms, have a very different feel. While the films are imbued with the textures of places, these are removed from them. Frozen Sky, which plays with the three-letter international codes assigned to airports, reflects a world as impersonal as an airport itself.
Recently, Langlands & Bell have explored the possibilities of interactive technology developed for computer games. This is used particularly effectively in The House of Osama Bin Laden, made a result of a trip to Afghanistan as war artists in 2002. The viewer is invited to explore, using a joystick, a site used as a training camp by Bin Laden in the mid 1990s. It feels game-like, as if one might be expected to disembowel a virtual terrorist at any moment, but the adrenaline-fuelled exploration reveals only more empty, desolate rooms.
Zardad's Dog, another film made as a result of the visit, was pulled from the Turner Prize show because it was feared it might prejudice the trial of a Serbian warlord at the Old Bailey.
Secretly filmed by the artists, it shows the trial of Abdullah Shah, allegedly a vicious killer, which resulted in a death sentence. The filming is characteristically sensitive – as much as is possible with the camera concealed in your lap – and the questions being asked characteristically subtle. Did the Afghan people's desire for revenge outweigh the workings of justice? Does even a condemned killer have human rights?
A charge often levelled at conceptual art is that it is cold, which can be an inevitable result of the intellectual process by which it is conceived. The films of Langlands & Bell are anything but, with their spontaneity, their quiet, careful observation and their desire to find the extraordinary in ordinary lives.
This show uncovers an important aspect of an important contemporary practice.
• Until 13 December
