A Review of the Red Bull Illume Installation at the Stone Arch Bridge

Back in the easier times of advertising, to make an appeal, you simply opted for a reasoned case for your product or tied its value to some sort of excellence. 

“If you own this or that, then you can deductively be assured you made the right choice!  Doctors agree!  Or you, too, can reach excellence with this or that!  Just watch Joe Green!” the subliminal slogans read.

Then advertising, as it became more encompassing, outgrew the easy associations and became “branding”.  Companies started producing total concepts, not just the juxtaposition of popular icons and sellable images. Products were parts of lifestyles, and product choices were lifestyle choices, much in the same way refutations of products and fight clubs were also lifestyle choices.  It was really no place for a logo.

Onward advertising goes in these recent years, with vanguard companies like Nike cribbing from high fashion to produce not only products, but the very underlying concepts that challenged the once simple reason and imagery.  Case in point: that astonishing Nike commercial where Brian Urlacher stands in an under-lit room with athletic clothing and a helmet made of barbs, classical music crashing throughout the extended television spot.  Also much like high fashion photo spreads, these spots more often than not landed in the realm of “confusing” more so than “inspiring”.

Now here we are today, plugged in the hi tek, surrounded by communciations, deluged in information, and advertising looking for new frontieers. 

The new sales pitch, thankfully, is to improve the consumer.  Nike has chucked its digital canvases and now produces software that loads a calculated soundtrack onto your ipod and feedback trackers into your high performance sneakers, helping runners become better runners, happier runners, and more company-loyal runners.  News organizations are now your portals for all your information needs.  And the list goes on.

It might seem like Red Bull’s exhibit of large, back-lit pictures might fit more squarely into the “confusing artsy” phase of advertising, but the energy drink company has created an interesting exhibit that, although sporting the occasional logo, successfully stands on its own and is worth your time to visit.

It’s tough to know what to expect from the general descriptions floating around that “the Stone Arch Bridge is lined with photocubes”.  As a result, when I visited the installation last night, I had very few expectations other than knowing there would be illuminated photos and that Red Bull gives me a stomach ache.

If you interested in seeing the set up and some of the photos, click through to the Flick slideshow I put together. (The full gallery is also on the Red Bull site.)  

What first catches a visitor’s attention is the fact that the public space has been invaded by a sponsored exhibit which is at its very basis one big advertisement.  The installation is imposing.  The cubes are around eight feet tall and square and line most of the length of the bridge.  And there are gate-like introductions on either end.

But once you pass on to view the lit sides of the cubes, the photography is brilliantly colorful, in some cases densely composed, and in all cases about extreme sports, which in no way detracts from the exhibit as you might anticipate.

Picture after picture, it’s hard not to be drawn in by the vibracy against the nighttime darkess.  My favorite block of photos came from James Holm’s series “Experimental”, a series that took the already impressive photos and added a big more staging and post production.  The house music playing out of speakers mounted on the light poles, gimmicky as it is, also positively adds to the experience.

There are a few drawbacks.  There are several chords snaking along the ground.  Small bugs have infiltrated a few of the cases, trying their best to get burned up by that oh-so-intoxicating illumination.  And I can imagine that during peak visiting hours, the limited walkways along the exhibit get quite full.     

But anytime there’s a successful transformation of a space, particularly the reconstruction of an existing space, it’s worth noting.  (If there’s any doubt about the effectiveness of the cubes, first look through the online gallery and then go to the exhibit late at night.  You’ll see how limited online display really is.)

Yes, it’s not art like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” in Central Park.  But for an advertisement on the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis, it’s really well done.  And it just may have expanded my perspective on large scale marketing campaigns.  Well done, advertising.