In Consistency II and 297x210 - Arthouse until March 14th

In Between - Temple Bar Gallery until March 3rd

Cheap - Temple Bar Studio 6 until March 3rd

For the next few weeks, Temple Bar is Conceptual City. Between them Arthouse and the Temple Bar Gallery are the venues for four multimedia exhibitions that have a number of things in common, especially a leaning towards conceptual strategies.

At Arthouse, artist Paul O'Neill has curated a show loosely tethered to the idea of Italo Calvino's missing memo, that is, the uncompleted portion of his posthumously published Six Memos for the next Millennium. The absent memo was titled Consistency, and the show is called In Consistency II.

Ideas of connection, completeness and the arbitrary run through a diverse body of work from 15 artists. Caroline McCarthy sets up a comparative taxonomy between images of pools and potato crisps, a visual equivalent of autodidactic mania, where chance connections are woven into paranoid conspiracy theories. Martin Creed has left bits of Blu-tack stuck randomly to the wall throughout the gallery, a subtle disruption of the white cube environment where everything is directed towards framing the work of art: one's instinctive response is that they shouldn't be there, but then you have to face the fact they are the "art". Or perhaps they're not.

This tactic of manoeuvring the viewer into a perceptual double-take is fairly typical of the show as a whole. David Blaney displays a collection of rubber bands in a museum-style vitrine. You look at them. They're just rubber bands, you think, quite rightly. By then you're likely to consider the practice of looking at artefacts in glass cases. Perhaps rubber bands are worthy of detailed consideration after all.

Blaney might yet come up with a treatise: A Definitive Guide to Rubber Band Topology. Some years ago, after seeing his work, a woman wrote to him: "I would like to take this opportunity to say that your exhibition is rubbish." He took it on the chin. Her letter determined much of the content of his next show, and he reprinted it in the catalogue.

Peter Lloyd writes his own letters, dispatching jaw-droppingly implausible inquiries to various institutions and exhibiting their straight-laced replies, in the process displaying a love-hate relationship with bureaucracy that is echoed in the work of many of the other participating artists.

With 12 others, Lloyd is included in 297x210, which happen to be the dimensions in millimetres of an A4 sheet, the staple bureaucratic paper format. Exhibitors were invited to produce something suitable for low-grade black-and-white reproduction on A4 paper, and the show, half-way between gallery display and book, was curated by London's Arthur R. Rose Gallery.

By this stage it should come as no surprise to you to learn that Rose does not exist, other than as an artists' invention. His identity is dispersed over a group of artist-curators. 297x210 signals Rose's quitting of a gallery space for more diverse projects. The book is, an accompanying leaflet helpfully if superfluously points out, "very different from the Book of Kells or Durrow". In time, it may come to be prized, if not quite to the extent of those illustrious predecessors then perhaps as much as the pioneering conceptual publications from the 1960s and 1970s.

These were cheerfully discarded as litter by all but a farseeing few. In fact, there is a certain nostalgia for that conceptual era in much of the work on show. Though steeped in ironic humour, it has more in common with the cool intellectualism of old-timers Joseph Kosuth or Lawrence Weiner than with the laddish populism of the current Young British Artists.

Paul O'Neill is himself exhibiting in the Temple Bar Gallery, in a collaborative show with Ronan McCrea. In between is a curiously, perhaps intentionally anomalous exhibition which leans a little too heavily towards flip conceptual one-liners for its own good - for example, two yellow post-it pads, framed separately, hung side by side, one reading "The best idea I ever had . . . " and the other "The worst idea I ever had . . . " The latter is much closer to the mark.

Rather better is a neon sign mounted on the wall, proclaiming "Nothing Special". Elsewhere, the blank strangeness of contemporary urban life is evoked in videos and photographs depicting states of suspension: a car journey through a blandly pleasant landscape, the interior of a passenger jet, the shoulder of a motorway with an urban sprawl beyond, and beanbags. There are some good elements, and the show does recreate a sense of that odd, anaesthetised state engendered by the homogenised experiences of mass transit and habitation.

Something similar crops up in Jean-Cristophe Beltrame's videos, which are part of a lively collaborative exhibition, called simply cheap by the art group PLUG upstairs in Studio 6. Beltrame's subjective views of a car on a perpetual roundabout, and what looks like a tram-ride through night-time city streets, suggest the circularity of urban routine. The other elements of the show, as it happens, largely forsake the city for a lively involvement with several wetland environments. There is an agreeable roughness to PLUG's endeavour, which emphasises process and suggests a distrust of definition.

Katie Holten characteristically marshals a battery of material in a working approximation of scientific method. It's like wandering into the deserted lab of a busy research technician. Without her presence, you cannot decipher the thrust of her project, though there are endless apparent clues and indications. Darren Davies conducted an informal cultural survey of visitors. You can check the results for yourself, though the diagrammatic tabulation of the information makes clear that he too nurtures feelings of hate as well as love for bureaucratic method.

Rather engagingly, art bureaucracy is evident in the way the fourth PLUG artist, Italian Matteo Tonelli has, like Prince, been superseded by another group identity, H.E.N.JAM, with its own official rubber stamp. He has produced a series of casts of specified areas of a wetland in Italy, which highlight the bureaucratic mediation between people and preserved landscape, and suggest that the land is shorn of cultural meaning through such isolation. A series of beautiful and witty recreations of direct, sensual contact with the land illustrate both the importance of such contact and the ways we are distanced from it. That, at least, is partly, though not entirely, what Tonelli's work seems to be about, in a show that fairly hums with ideas.