COME to the Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries exhibition – and come you must if you are at all interested in the artists emerging from Scotland’s art schools – and the first thing to strike you may be its size. It may be finely curated, but with two floors of the RSA in use, the sheer volume might seem overwhelming.

This is an exhibition of new artists, fresh talent picked straight from last year’s degree shows. These are the lucky students who came into the art school galleries one morning last summer to find a cardboard plaque on the wall next to their degree show with “New Contemporaries” written on it.

There is art of every persuasion here, from painting to photography, sculpture to film. That, indeed, is the bonus of exhibitions like this – if you don’t like something, you won’t have to wait very long before you find something that you do, although the more subtle video and audio installations occasionally get a little lost amidst so much work visually competing for attention.

Wandering through the ground floor galleries, I enjoyed Katie Watson’s acid-bright, graphical diptych of arable fields (“A Divided Landscape”) viewed through close cropped woodland, for its immediacy and thoughtfulness (Grays School of Art). Lucy Wayman’s rambunctiously massive mop-rope sculpture still had the presence it had in Edinburgh College of Art last year, if on an even greater scale, looped from the ceiling. And Jasmine Summerton’s silver Cairngorm “Observatory” tent was a pure and evocative exercize in the process of looking (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design), bookended on the other side of the hall by Claire Connor’s mouthy cardboard placards(DJCAD). Natalie Howlett’s installation of a future doctor surgery, run entirely by virtual reality healthcare providers, was still chilling in its plausibility, especially when the room was empty (ECA). In that vein, Elisavet Christodoulou’s pained images of damaged heads (“Heads of Noble Soldiers”) were a mix of fascinating and repugnant, a line-up of flesh-eating diseases, so it seemed, but telling of the horrors of war (Grays).

Amidst attention-grabbing large scale works, Frances Rokhlin’s “Colditz” paintings on Farrow and Ball wallpaper stood out alongside her small scale presentations of “mundane” architecture and urban vistas, both in paint and woodcut (ECA). There is an honesty to these works that engages. The lot won her the prestigious Glenfiddich Artist in Residence Award (worth £10,000) and it will be fascinating to see what she produces.

The other big prize – the £14,000 Fleming-Wyfold Bursary – went to Camille Bernard (Glasgow School of Art) for her incredibly assured “The Deluge”. A triptych of images, which stylistically seemed to dip into influences as diverse as Gauguin and mediaeval biblical tableaux, surrounded a screen showing a short film in which Man tries to exert his influence over a Nature which in the end submerges him. There was something quasi-ritualistic in this work, in the interest in man’s processes, in our contracts and subcontracts with the natural world and our views, our mythologies, of it. Bernard’s design sense is fine-tuned, both in the set and costumes of the video and the surrounding tableaux.

And this year there are strange, unexplained rituals everywhere, as if last year’s graduates were collectively channelling the spirit of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, say, that classic pseudo-ritual clothed in whacky costumes and bloodlust. If some works took too long to assert their necessity – and required somewhat over-complicated artist’s statements to elucidate (or otherwise) – there was much questioning of our sense of norms elsewhere.

Downstairs, there was a strong showing in architecture. Here were ideas writ large and much thinking out of the box, reworking former industrial zones (Lewis McNeill and Andrew Thomson in Brooklyn's Red Hook; Strathclyde University) or areas susceptible to piecemeal urban encroachment. Philosopher robots and their ilk rolled (somewhat chillingly) through Jung Li Foo’s animation of his project “Urban Fracking”, a speculative attempt to revitalize 21st century Berlin and its corporate architecture through the engagement of its people (Mackintosh School of Architecture).

And then there were the architectural models, all realized in exquisite miniature. Fergus Low, Robbie Miller and Elspeth Tayler’s stunning model of their revamp of Ravenscraig gently wobbled its urban regeneration plan on teetering metal rods (University of Dundee); Oliver Beetschen, Jonathan Piper and Shimal Morjaria’s Otemachi Tower (sectional model 1:200) was completed in staggering detail, filled with tiny people sitting at their desks or riding in miniature lifts (Edinburgh School of Architecture). Rather more understated, but pleasing, Daniel Cardno’s Marine Research Centre, its three boat-like warehouse buildings moored in a remote bay in Norway (Scott Sutherland School of Architecture). In the midst was artist Penny Rees’ architectural mood board, a murky film of Thames fog, observed and presented, oscillating between calm and movement (Moray School of Art).

This stimulating diversity in response to the challenges of 21st century urban living and how we fit in to the decreasing rural space around us, coalesced into a potential for exploring new answers, a rethinking of the status quo. And that, perhaps, is what this huge hand-picked survey of emerging artists does best – present us with possible futures.

New Contemporaries 2017 is at The Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture, The Mound, Edinburgh until March 15

www.royalscottishacademy.org