SIT on a chair and hear muttering voices through giant ear trumpets. Step into a small room and watch the sounds and motions of The Killing Machine, where robotic arms simulate an execution by lethal injection on an empty chair, in an horrifically beautiful work of art.
The installations by the Canadian artists, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, filling the Fruitmarket Gallery in August are expected to be a major draw in Edinburgh this summer.
They feature among the highlights of the Edinburgh Art Festival,
which unveiled a programme yesterday embracing more than 50 exhibitions in spaces from the National Galleries of Scotland to the gardens of Portobello.
More than 600,000 people passed through the doors of participating Edinburgh art galleries in 2007, and the festival hopes to beat that figure this year, said director Joanne Brown.
The line-up includes three new galleries. The Ingleby Gallery is opening its new home in a former rock venue, while the Dovecot Studios are in the former Infirmary Street Baths and the Eskmills gallery in Musselburgh is also opening for its first summer.
But the festival is to distribute 60,000 copies of a high-quality, glossy 60-page guide to other attractions. They include the painter Andrew Grassie at the Talbot Rice Gallery, and the much-loved Scottish artist Dame Elizabeth Blackadder at the Scottish Gallery.
"The festival is a catalyst for the development of new and exciting work, showcasing the full range of the city's galleries and artists at a time when the world's eyes are on Edinburgh," said Ms Brown.
Inverleith House is showing the Protest Pictures of the pop artist Alexander Hamilton, including Shock and Awe, his digitally blended image of Tony Blair as an ageing cowboy with six-guns swinging on his hips.
The artist Richard Wilson, described as Britain's most famous installation artist, who has represented the UK at art festivals world-wide, has his first show in Edinburgh for 20 years, at the Grey Gallery.
At the National Galleries, August exhibitions range from the major retrospective of Britart icon Tracey Emin, to Impressionism and Scotland, showing works by the likes of Renoir and Gauguin alongside the Scottish Colourists. Emin and Wilson are among the artists appearing in person at festival talks.
There is a strong range of contemporary installation art at the festival this year.
The Fruitmarket director, Fiona Bradley, is hoping the show by artistic partners Cardiff and Bures Miller, who won a special jury prize at the Venice Biennale in 2001 for their work, will be a critical and popular hit. It divides the gallery into individual rooms, each showing a single installation.
In Dark Pool, from 1995, visitors step into an old room that looks like an old artist's studio or a mad scientist's laboratory. There are piles of books, and strange electrical equipment. Walking around triggers sound and dialogue about the mysterious dark pool.
"It's a coup for the Fruitmarket and it's a treat for our audience," said Ms Bradley. "You don't need to know anything about contemporary art to absolutely love it."
Other popular draws will be Art Late, on 28 August, when at least 12 galleries open late with DJs, drinks, comedy and poetry.
Festival Scavengers is run by the artist Joshua Sofaer, who set up similar projects in New York, San Francisco and London.
Forty Scavenger teams of four people will be invited to scour the city for clues, begging, borrowing or making the answers that are then turned into an artwork. The winning team collects a £2,000 cash prize.
The Portobello art group Big Things on the Beach is showing The Garden Gallery, which sees artists putting works into private gardens. Spam: the musical promises video art by Boris Eldagsen in surprise locations around the city.
The guide, with a fold-out map, has been a major expenditure, in an effort to produce a quality art magazine.
Turner Prize winner's work will launch Scotland's showcase contemporary galleryVISITORS to Edinburgh looking down through the grand arches on Waterloo Place will see a highly visible symbol of contemporary art's place in the capital.
On its tenth anniversary, the prestigious Ingleby Gallery is moving to a new 6,000ft space near Waverley Station, making it the largest private contemporary gallery outside London.
The Billboard for Edinburgh project features a series of international artists exhibiting work on a billboard on the end wall of the building in Calton Road.
The first is to be Mark Wallinger, this year's Turner Prize winner with State Britain, his meticulous recreation of an anti-war protester's dismantled camp outside the Houses of Parliament.
Richard and Florence Ingleby have long wanted to expand beyond their current base in a Georgian terrace house.
"We are very pleased to have it open in time for the Edinburgh Art Festival," Mr Ingleby said. "Expansion is something we have been talking about and thinking about pretty seriously for a number of years."
The gallery will open with the first Scottish showing of the American painter Kay Rosen. At the same time, it will host the first solo exhibition in Scotland by Susan Collis, who was born in Edinburgh and now lives and works in London.
Collis's work gives the illusion of something half finished, or left behind by a previous show. But the screws in the walls are actually of solid gold, and rawlplugs of turquoise and coral.
Wallinger's work on the billboard will be followed by two other major contemporary artists, Rachel Whiteread and the Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans.
The gallery will issue limited-edition prints of the artists' works, selling them by subscription to fund the project.
"There aren't large-scale, serious, contemporary galleries outside London. There isn't, as far as I know, anything on this kind of scale. We had the ambition to give it a try," Mr Ingleby said.
The full article contains 985 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
