Video art with a capital "V" doesn't really exist any more. The video camera is just another tool in the artist's kit, and the monitor or projector are as at home in the gallery as good old paintings and sculptures.

By the 1970s, the medium was maturing - pioneers Nam Jun Paik and Fred Forest first taped and screened footage shot on Sony Rovers, the first portable recording devices that allowed for instant playback and easy editing, in the middle 1960s - but still in a state of flux, with artists feeling their way around the new medium, making video art about video, and the possibilities it offers the artist.

In a new show titled Video from the 70s and 80s, at doggerfisher in Edinburgh, Mick Hartney's Orange Free State opens with the camera roving over a tableau of oranges in bowls set on a table covered in an artfully arranged white sheet, borrowing from a Cezanne still life. Hartney tests the viewer's patience, repeatedly panning his camera over the scene to a syrupy Debussy soundtrack, only to focus in on a monitor set up in the studio, which is showing the footage just seen, including the moment when the action shifts from the studio to the monitor, leaving us watching a video inside a video inside a video.

Next, a young black woman takes a place at the table, and begins to peel and segment an orange while delivering a short spiel offering unconventional investment advice. "If you have no social conscience," she says, "you can invest in South Africa. If you are downright anti-social, you can invest in art." This time, the camera can't keep still, and images of the young woman are intercut, layered and repeated.

In the third and final section, the woman undergoes an interview in which a disembodied, patronising voice, male and presumably white, dismisses her protests that she has "done the work" by speaking her words and peeling the orange, insisting that "the orange and the words are not the work, watching the orange and hearing the words are the work".

There is, too, a pretty confusing discussion of when the events shown have happened - are they in the actors' present, the edit suite's past, or the viewer's future?

On paper, this discussion of the work's means of production, race, gender and South African boycott politics, all filtered through self-conscious use of tricksy effects and repetitive editing might read as terribly dated, but Hartney's enthusiastic analysis of video as a medium, paired with his weighty, densely layered political content, is little short of breathtaking - video might be old hat now, but Orange Free State is nothing of the sort.

Chris Meigh-Andrews's Distracted Driver is, compared with Orange Free State, a simple, meditative piece. The familiar screeches of Bernard Herrmann's score for the shower scene from Psycho are matched to grainy, blurred footage shot through the windscreen of a moving car. As the music fades, the car's passenger embarks on a lengthy retelling of the film's plot, stumbling over the details. Bored Driver might have been a better title. The motorist, who occasionally interrupts, sounds decidedly nonplussed, replying, when finally asked if he has seen "Hitchcock's best movie", with a curt "No".

On screen, Meigh-Andrews uses rudimentary processing effects to colour the over-saturated image, shifting from blue to purple to red, with street lamps, the driver's hands on the wheel and the occasional pedestrian picked out in glimmering highlights. The result is a piece of anti-Hitchcock anti-cinema: instead of being caught up in the action, manipulated by the director, and distracted by a MacGuffin, the viewer shares in the subjective experience of the poor, bored driver, the shifting colours hinting at a bid to avoid falling asleep at the wheel.

Simpler still, Stephen Partridge's installation is a single shot of a small monitor screened on the monitor itself, resulting in an endless repeat of the shot feeding back on itself, a visual equivalent of Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting In A Room. It's a simple experiment, testing out what happens when you point a camera at a screen showing the camera's output, and feels more like an instructional essay on the technical potential of video, as if Partridge is working towards a formal language of video.

Next door in doggerfisher's small second gallery space there's a loop of works by David Hall and Ian Breakwell. The most remarkable thing about these pieces is that they were shown on commercial television. Hall's advert-break-length TV pieces were screened on Scottish Television in 1971, appearing unannounced, with no explanation, designed as "interruptions" to the regular flow of programmes. His shots of a telly burning in a field, or a tap filling the screen with water must have come as quite a shock. Breakwell's Continuous Diary, a series of 21 pieces, was doubtless quite at home on the Channel 4 of old, but it now seems inconceivable that an artist would be given a slot in which to combine mundane observations of an artist's daily life, a psychogeographical tour of London's East End and a searing attack on the treatment of wounded soldiers returning from the Falklands war.

It really is a shame that there's no longer any room for this type of experimental programming between the endless repeats of imported comedy and increasingly cynical reality television.

The hint of nostalgia offered by Breakwell and Hall's television pieces doesn't, however, dominate this selection from the archives of REWIND, the University of Dundee's video art research and preservation project. Instead, the steady, deliberate experimentation seen in much of the work on show, and the sense of excitement these artists must have felt while striking out into new territory, is infectious. The medium might now be a familiar one, but, over the two hours it takes to watch Video from the 70s and 80s, viewers are given the chance to experience video as it once was, a new, even shocking, format for artists to explore.

Video from the 70s and 80s is at doggerfisher, Edinburgh until October 25.