Standard Life Opening Event: Bloom

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59 Productions are nothing if not increasingly ambitious. Not content with splashing public art on the front of the Usher Hall (2015), or Castle Rock (2016), this year's EIF opener bursts bright and loud onto the many, many facades of St Andrew Square. Anyone who's struggled to get a PowerPoint in focus (me, every time) will appreciate the technical audacity of the undertaking. And it's this scale and ambition which makes the public event such a fun 'hello!' to festivals 2017.

Ostensibly, Bloom tells the story of Edinburgh as a festival city, with visuals and music to celebrate each festival and the year of its inaugaration. The Tattoo (1950) is an appropriately thick assault of marching and tartan. The Jazz and Blues Festival (1978) is a rollicking frenzy of sight and sound.

To be a killjoy momentarily, there's a few things to nip at. Some sections are less explicable. The Film Festival gets an oddly wistful exposition, which is hard to fathom other than as a means to give a bit of emotional shape. Cheekily, the Fringe gets a date stamp of 1948, which seems churlish in a year that it joins the 70-year celebrations. The aesthetic coheres around a concentric 'blooming' theme which works. But there's not always a logic to its thematic development. The 'travel' section jumps from post-war nostalgia to a jarringly contemporary, cutesy 3D animation. It feels a little like an ad for a high street bank.

But, perhaps, that's to miss the point. What's public artwork for? If it's to provide shared moments of joy and inspiration then there's a few of these here – especially the blast when wartime destruction flowers into an artistic rennaissance. If it's to celebrate the unique fact of Edinburgh's festival past and present then, tick. If it's to make arts and creativity unavoidably, unashamedly visible and integral to the life of a city, then Bloom knocks it out the park.