I never made it to the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow during the 1970s.

I was busy growing up in darkest Ayrshire at the time. The closest I ever got to far-out psychedelia was a pinafore my mum fashioned out of cloth bought in The Remnant Shop in Kilmarnock. However, as I discovered this week after dipping into 140 hours of groovy (if grainy) unedited video tape from the 1970s Glasgow arts scene, it was all happening just 25 miles up the road in the building now known as the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) at 350 Sauchiehall Street.

For a compelling couple of hours, I was catapulted back in time. The star of this show is a video camera which poet, playwright and visionary Third Eye founder Tom McGrath bought in March 1973 after a trip to the Rotterdam Arts Foundation. McGrath recognised the possibilities in video as a means of chronicling events. He also predicted its power as an art form. The video team– which consisted of McGrath, Ian Black and Jak Milroy – learned from their mistakes, often shooting footage of their own families at home, and this is part of the charm when viewing this material.

Dipping in, I watched Beat poet Allen Ginsberg recite his work in the old Scottish Arts Council office in Blythswood Square; jazz legends Keith Tippett, Elton Dean and Hugh Hopper play at the same gig in 1975; performance poets in full flow; a chanting guru called Sri Chinmoy bless the new centre; Sorley MacLean and Edwin Morgan recite poetry to a backdrop of a Joan Eardley exhibition; and a ghostly, soundless conference inside Barlinnie's Special Unit. A youthful and bearded Bill Forsyth appears at one point, staring at the camera and asking how it works. And there's John Byrne up a ladder with a huge moustache and twinkling eyes, as McGrath defends the use of public money on paintings on gable ends in Partick to a posh-sounding STV reporter.

A highlight is McGrath giving a tour of the dingy former wallpaper factory that would become the Third Eye Centre. He brims over with a vision of how the proposed arts centre will end up. His then wife Maureen, carting around a huge camera battery, is glimpsed briefly in the mirror, before we're taken out blinking into the daylight to Sauchiehall Street going about its business of a lunchtime in 1973.

The Third Eye's genesis as a place where Glaswegians were introduced to new ideas and ideologies is all here, under the headings of music, social events, spiritual, art, architecture and exhibitions, videos, literary, the building, performance and community. The exhibition's title – What We Have Done, What We Are About To Do – is taken from a headline in an issue of an arts magazine called NuSpeak, from 1975, which is also on display. This magazine, edited and written by McGrath, offers a vision of the melting pot of creativity that he envisaged The Third Eye Centre would house.

"In such hard times, the new centre is a very positive step to take," he writes.

This exhibition is the public's first glimpse of a Glasgow School of Art and CCA research project, The Glasgow Miracle: Materials Towards Alternative Histories. The project, which has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), is digitising film, documentation and materials from the Third Eye Centre and CCA archives from 1972 to the present day.

The term Glasgow Miracle was coined by Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obris in 1996 to describe a hothouse of artistic talent emerging from the city. The phenomenon has gathered pace with the anointing of several Glasgow-grown Turner Prize winners in recent years. It was even the subject of a recent BBC documentary by Alan Yentob.

Miracles, as CCA director Francis McKee, is well aware, do not happen overnight. "This is very much a work in progress," he says. "But it is setting the scene. The newly digitised films are in a very raw state, unedited and, in many cases, unidentified. We are extending an invitation to visitors to help us identify the material, or to share their memories of events seen on screen that they may have attended. The exhibition is a progress report on the archival process rather than a completed project. It also opens up the subject of archive, giving the chance to engage with some of the content we are discovering."

Research aside, it offers a dip into the waters of an almost-forgotten side of Glasgow subculture. Even if you are not searching for a miracle, you'll be hooked. It's far out, man.

What We Have Done, What We Are About To Do, CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow (0141 352 4911, www.cca- glasgow.com) until September 15