The signal is the essence of sound and digital image: from the invisible material information to the naked eye, codified and flowing through the filmic technologies of the age of the Web. Its access, of paramount importance, is in protected mode (Friedrich Kittler). On one side digital tools are built as black boxes in the middle of which the signal processing is carefully rendered opaque and inaccessible. On the other, private companies and governments of the intelligence services have unlimited technological power of interception and investigation of signals to conduct their surveillance and profiling globally. Rejecting this paradox, some artists like Pierre-Yves Cruaud, HC Gilje, Paolo Gioli, Benjamin Muzzin, Jacques Perconte, Leighton Pierce, Joost Rekveld, Sadia Sadia, Jerome Schlomoff, develop signal intelligence: they thus pass its regulated treatment according to the standards of audiovisual experimentation to release the untapped plastic resources and express all the strata of the artist's sensibility.

The palingenesis means regeneration after an apparent death. In cinema, the rebirth of nature may appear in the pattern, the shape of the film or the image itself. For example in the return of vegetation among the ruins and trauma of History (Resnais, Pollet, Herzog).

The exhibition that MuMa dedicates to Nicolas de Staël gives us the opportunity to question the materiality of the image. Light as a raw material. It passes through the eye of a painter who restores it in his landscapes: glowing in the South, changing in the North. In the films of Nathaniel Dorsky and Paul Clipson, it flows into the camera lens and fixes into film, writing that subtle partition of clear and dark, revealing the optical magic of the recording device.

Device set aside by practitioners of direct cinema, cameraless film, who paint directly on the film as Stan Brakhage and Emmanuel Lefrant. The film strip is no longer simply the space where the image is formed, it increases in thickness and becomes the concrete support of the pictorial material. A different material for the image, the pixel has only temporal reality, but may be subject to speculation. In the work of Jacques Perconte, compressions and decompressions allow passages from the figurative to the abstract, without opposing them, as in the painting of Staël.