The hyalosign – ‘[t]he crystal-image, or crystalline description’ – is the first of the time-images (C2: 69). Opsigns and sonsigns are pure actual optical and sound situations, the de-differentiated image on-screen, visual and sonic fragments in a state of zeroness. This is to say, opsigns and sonsigns are immediately hyalosigns. For if ‘the actual [image] is cut off from its motor linkages’, there is – for Deleuze – a simultaneous relinkage; this relinkage is the ‘coalescence of an actual image and its virtual image’ (C2: 127). In other words, opsigns and sonsigns stymie the seamless flow of actual image to actual image; while the hyalosign links the actual image to a virtual correlate. In this way, opsigns and sonsigns ‘are nothing other than slivers of crystal-images’ (C2: 69). Opsigns and sonsigns – through their very constitution – must become hyalosigns; an actual must relink to the virtual if delinked from other actuals. Accordingly, the hyalosign is the ‘description’ of an image on-screen – a fragment, now – the ‘most restricted circuit of the actual image and its virtual’ (C1: 69). This actual and virtual of the hyalosign has three aspects: a description of the immediate image, a description of an image that is passing into the past, and a description of an image coming from the future. Each of these descriptions – the in itself, the passing and the becoming – concerns the temporal dimensions of an actual with its virtual: an exchange of actual and virtual, the virtual sustaining the disconnection between actuals. Deleuze writes: ‘there is no virtual which does not become actual in relation to an actual, the latter becoming virtual through the same relation’ (C2: 69). The in itself, the passing and the becoming of description are the three exchanges of the hyalosign: ‘making presents pass, replacing one by the next while going towards the future, but also preserving all the past, dropping it into an obscure depth’ (C2: 87). Describing the hyalosign through such temporal coordinates allows Deleuze to designate the structure and genesis of signs of the image: both their general condition (which will in turn inspire the coordinates of chronosigns and noosigns) and their specific attributes (as crystal-images).