film-strips panning

Film-strips panning is a site-specific installation of three panoramic photographic film-strips tracing collective movement and street demonstrations. The images were projected, panning across six portrait-format windows at the Center for Collaboration and Media, Yale, gradually shifting from the internal exhibition space to become visible as external public street projections, as daylight fades.

In her ongoing practice of taking film-strips, Sigune uses a photographic camera like a movie camera: She exposes a whole 35mm film in one continuous rewinding movement while turning in relation to the crowd, producing a continuous multi-perspective image. Her performative process of ‘tracing’ her surroundings with a handheld camera as an extension of her body abstracts and compresses the action, yet details fix the image as a record of the actual event.

In collaboration with neuroscientists at the Wu Tsai Institute, Sigune examined the fragmented nature of perception in the construction of images. She considers attention as a set of filters that organise our often disjointed thoughts/ memories/ perceptions into a coherent form (or what we perceive to be coherent) – a sense of continuity in time and space that is crucial to film-strips.

Context

As featured guest artist at the Centre for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), Hamann presented a site-specific new work derived from panoramic photographs (film-strips) tracing street demonstrations. Projected across six large windows of the CCAM building on York Street, the multi-projector work created a diorama-like viewing environment visible to both gallery visitors and passersby. By returning images of protest and collective assembly to the public streets of New Haven, the installation re-situated street demonstration imagery within civic spaces from which it originated.
The project was first presented during Evening of the Arts 2025 at the Yale University Art Gallery, in partnership with the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), CCAM, the Haas Arts Library, and Yale College Arts.
To realise the installation, Hamann proposed using specialist projection material that transformed the building’s windows into large-scale projection surfaces. The work was subsequently implemented through CCAM’s new 4K projection-mapping system. Conceived as an adaptable exhibition infrastructure, the screen installation has since been retained as a permanent curatorial platform CCAM Mix for postgraduate exhibitions and experimental media projects.

Related perception research

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted with the video animation footage within the Brainworks eye-tracking suite, extending the project’s investigation into aspects of perception and attention, and moving-image display.

The installation at CCAM also coincided with and extended Hamann’s interdisciplinary seminar at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), which examined how artworks are displayed and experienced over time, and the role of attention, embodied perception, and interconnected perceptual settings in gallery and archival contexts. Taking the newly altered spatial arrangements and hang of the YCBA galleries as a point of departure, the seminar convened a cross-disciplinary conversation on the embodied dimensions of spectatorship and display.

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