Desire for Direction: The Alter Bahnof Video Walk

This essay considers Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012), a participatory guided audio-video tour through Kassel’s old train station, situated at the sprawling site of Documenta 13. Focusing on their own experience, Takahashi considers how connotative, complex, and creative thinking can emerge from one’s movements through enormous international art exhibitions, where one encounters a series of complex artworks in rapid succession. Is there potential in how physical limitations combine with too much information and too much aesthetic experience? What does it mean to lose control and objectivity, to give up the distanced, objective view, and instead be immersed, embodied, emotional, and frustrated?