By now the resounding whistle of Doug Aitken's "Station to Station" art train has blown all the way across the country, from New York City to the Bay Area. The "nomadic happening," as the artist called it, brought artists, musicians and other creative visionaries together for exhibitions and performances in cities like Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Santa Fe last month. "What I really like about Doug is that he wants to communicate with the whole world," said the German photographer and sculptor Thomas Demand, one of the project's participants, who has known Aitken for nearly two decades. Demand's typical process is to build facsimiles of historically freighted places - from Jackson Pollock's studio to the control room at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant - and then photograph them before destroying them. At Aitken's request, he did something slightly different for "Station to Station," which captured some of the essence of the project. Using video rather than still photography, Demand showed a train barreling through a white sheet of paper, like football players bursting through a banner at the start of a game, then continuing full speed ahead. Titled "Trailer," the vignette played at "Station to Station" stops, and can now be seen for the first time by a wider public. But this being Demand, the piece was naturally inscribed with a bit of history. It was meant to evoke the Lumière Brothers" 1895 short film, "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat," which terrified audiences who didn't understand the medium. "I thought it would be really cool to see the weird old angst from when cinema was invented," Demand said. People would run out of the cinema, shattered by the reality of the image. However, he never considered recreating the Lumière Brothers" film, as with his other work, he said, wanting to offer a "light comment" rather than being didactic. The film represents "what Doug is trying to do, to break the screen," he added. It wasn't too highbrow-arty. I respect that about his approach.