The concept of the film and the accompanying object could be regarded as the fruit of my reading of Umberto Ecos’s ""A Theory of Semiotics"". Eco isolates what he calls the ""light/dark code"" as the fundamental photographic (and thus also filmic code). The elements of this code are tiny little dots and components which carry no meaning per se similar to the phonemes of spoken language. Only in combination with other such meaningless particles these photographic dots and shadows create figurative ""meaning"". With ""Motion Picture La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon"" I wanted to isolate these fundamental elements of the light/dark code and make them visible within a new film. Hence, I marched into the darkroom and mounted 50 strips of unexposed 16mm film on the wall, so that a surface of 50 x 80 cm was completely covered with these film strips. Then a frame from the first theatrical film ever, ""La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon"" (1895) by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, was projected onto that surface. The exposed strips were developed and edited together (from left to right of their original position on the wall). The result is a three minute 16mm film showing the light-dark elements of the Lumière image, emptied of all figurative content. Additionally the original film strips were put into a wooden box reminiscent of an early Lumière camera to be exhibited next to the projected film.