At the tail end of last year, I interviewed veteran painter Derek Clarke on the eve of his 100th birthday.

Clarke studied at London's Slade School of Art in the early 1930s and spent more than 30 years teaching at Edinburgh College of Art, where his students included John Bellany and Elizabeth Blackadder. With the pragmatism of an old man married to a youthful optimism that delights in the shock of the new, he told how he suspected in 50 years' time "painting will have played itself out ... It's already happening and is the way of things. Creative people will find avenues for their creativity."

After an afternoon spent at Glasgow School of Art's School of Fine Art Degree Show in the magnificent setting of the Mackintosh Building, this observation made perfect sense. It isn't as though the would-be artists here are not painting or drawing, it's just that these are not the only weapons in their artistic armoury.

What impressed me most in this degree show – and also struck me recently at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee and at Edinburgh College of Art – is that young artists are curating and archiving their work in a way that Clarke could never have envisaged as he refined his painting style some 80 years ago. They are recording and layering their work with help from mediums across the digital board.

And they are becoming their work too. Some of the strongest pieces I've seen at all three degree shows have been in performance-based art. I was lucky enough to catch one such performance last week at GSA when I took a walk around with Jim Birrell, head of Painting and Printmaking. It wasn't scheduled, but with external examiners in that day, one student, Frances Davis, had just given a live performance of her work, (T)Here, on the upper level of Studio 43, and we asked if she'd do another for us.

As Davis stood in front of a large screen in a skin-tight white Lycra dress, she sang in a low, beautiful voice. Google Maps took us for a walk through Glencoe Street in Anniesland. These maps, plus mouse tracks over her body and her live singing, invoked the infamous massacre of Glencoe. The effect was quite devastating.

Elsewhere at GSA this year, exploration of life in a post-digital age carries on apace. James MacEachran, from Sculpture and Environmental Art, may as well be hanged for a goat as a kid for his playful remaking of an anthropomorphic online zoo, which consists of a well-fashioned all-wooden set with two beasts made of metal, one holding a TV within a wooden frame which is showing crazy music videos that occasionally erupt into a goat-like shriek.

Another "set" which has a touchy yet homespun feel is outdoor-pursuits enthusiast Karen McIntyre's Hats On The Hill installation, the centrepiece of which is a tent with hand-knitted woolly hats strung out from the guy ropes. Inside the tent, you can lie down and watch a video of hat-wearers in action. Outside, there is the most luxurious fluffy armchair I have seen in several days of marching through degree shows.

In Studio 25, I took a shine to the collaboration between Fine Art and Photography's Aleksandra Roch and Sculpture and Environmental Art's Justyna Ataman, which merges a kooky, faceless, enforced jauntiness with graphic symbols of corporate wealth and power in a symmetrical set piece. There is performance, film and design here. All art is political, especially when it comes to warehouses full of flat-pack furniture...

There's also some choice work in Fine Art Photography, including Catherine Cameron's large monochrome "paintings with light" and Nathalie Holbrook's delicately light-filled, wall-based prints and a floating sculpture made out of hundreds of twigs covered in white papier mache.

Jennifer Nicholson's beautifully controlled paintings with bleach, in which she recreates scenes painted by the likes of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, are also quite magical. And Jennifer Clews's rocking wooden chairs – the film version – in Studio 21 are still tapping away in my mind. Simple, yet unsettling.

GSA Degree Show 2013, Mackintosh Building, Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow (www.gsa.ac.uk) until June 15