Dundee Contemporary Art's 10th anniversary year gets off to a mixed start with a show that celebrates the passage of time but fails to imagine the future

It's thus a pleasant little conceit that Dundee Contemporary Arts should start the year with Timecode, a group show that explores the human compulsion to measure time. But Timecode not only marks the turn of the year. It celebrates the start of DCA's 10th anniversary year and includes such figures as Douglas Gordon, On Kawara and Tatsuo Miyajima, whose work has been shown in the gallery before. The shock of the new has become the established order.

It will be a year of international ambition. In June, DCA will curate Scotland's contribution to the Venice Biennale, a solo project by Martin Boyce supported by the Scottish Arts Council, the British Council and the National Galleries of Scotland.

That DCA should frame itself in that competitive international context says everything about its first decade. For the gallery and cinema complex, under leadership of directors and curators such as Andrew Nairne, Faith Liddell, Katrina Brown and Clive Gilman, has been a flagship visual arts venue for Scotland.

Highlights of that first decade included the first museum solo show for Olafur Eliasson, who went on to astound audiences with The Weather Project, his huge indoor sun for the Tate. It was also memorable for a series of important and ambitious showcases for homegrown artists such as Simon Starling, Christine Borland and Claire Barclay, as well as Here And Now, the closest the country came to a definitive survey of the period during the Nineties that Scotland's art scene took to the world stage.

The centre's birth was not without controversy but DCA proved that by developing a close and trusting relationship with your audience, you can take them to new places. Economic research also established it was an engine for wider change, a key plank in city strategies for creating employment and changing perceptions of a city whose reputation was once founded on jute, jam and journalism. On reflection it has been 10 years to be pretty proud of.

But back to January and it sure feels like January. In an empty room you can hear the artist Kelly Mark reciting a list of things she really must do. "I really must floss more often," she says. It's a familiar litany: from changing the cat litter to going for a walk. Apparently there are 1,000 of these things to do. Not so much New Year resolutions then as procrastination as a finely tuned art form in itself.

Across the gallery, artistic duo Thomson and Craighead (who rather cutely are billed as residing in London and Kingussie) have devised a computer programme for their artwork Beacon, which creates text on one of those lovely European railway signs that make a satisfying flap when they change. The words are harvested from the constant flow of internet search engines. It's billed as a form of "concrete poetry", but it's more like a startling public glimpse into people's private motivations. While Kelly is still chastising herself about the things she really must do, some people are out there in cyberspace getting on with it. During my visit, the words "8 bedroom tampa vacation home," flip up. It is January indeed.

The duo's companion work Horizon, is less happy: a grid of webcam images from every time zone across the world. The idea is that by reflecting the full span of the Earth it acts as a kind of global sundial. But because the artists haven't staged or situated the webcams themselves, there's no poetry to the locations or clear purpose to uniting these electronic eyes. The result is a perpetual electronic gloom, that seems to suggest that everywhere is equally miserable day or night, by sun or moon.

This is a show that is split between those artists who mark time in these more digital or conceptual manners and those who unite their ideas with their hands. Some choose precision, a handful choose poetry.

The legendary Japanese artist On Kawara falls firmly within the former camp. He has made marking the passage of time absolutely central to his work for more than 40 years, through text, performance and painting. His date paintings are just that – the date they are made in black and white. For Timecode the gallery is showing some books and his audio work A Million Years, representing the artist in his less accessible and more esoteric aspects.

Ross Birrell has produced what looks like a rather fetching abstract expressionist wall drawing, entitled The Unexpected: Saccade. It turns out the marks are not painterly inspiration but the traces of quick successive eye movements of someone viewing an art work. The implication is of a cursory glance rather than a detailed analysis.

How long do we spend looking at a work of art, and how long does it take to make one? Birrell suggests it's an uneven match by placing his work Rough Diamond nearby. The work is a lump of coal that will have taken some 300 million years to form. Being a smart cookie he has asked leading art insurers Hiscox to insure this lump of carbon as a diamond. He will only need to wait another three billion years under the right atmospheric conditions.

One of the most lyrical projects is presented as a working idea. The Glasgow-based American artist Ilana Halperin has spent many years now testing the emotional and artistic implications of the disparity between the vast scale of geological time and the short span of everyday life. She presents a working model for a future project, a relief sculpture that will be made, not by hand but by geological process thanks to the constant drip of mineral-rich water in a limestone cave.

While there's ample food for thought in this show, it does feel a little flat for the start of what ought to be a time of celebration. DCA can fall into the classic trap of a mid-sized venue by being neither large enough for vast ambition, nor small enough for intimate playfulness. Thus Timecode inevitably falls far short of a museum-scale survey of our obsession with time.

It's fun to imagine the other artists who might have been included if such a large show were possible. There is no work by the painter Roman Opalka, for example, who marks time by portraying himself every day, or by Martin Creed who recently livened up Tate Britain's rather stern Duveen galleries by sending an athlete to run down them every 30 seconds during gallery opening hours.

But when most of the artists in this show are well established and many are familiar, one wonders if an exhibition consisting entirely of less well-known artists might have reaped bigger rewards in terms of stimulating fresh thoughts on the subject. On the cusp of this important year, Timecode says quite a lot about where contemporary art, and DCA itself, has been in the last 10 excellent years: but not quite enough about its future.

Until March 8 www.dca.org.uk