The session proposes a critical introduction to the use of artificial intelligence in contemporary cinema, situating these technologies within a broader transformation of cultural infrastructures and audiovisual production. Drawing on concrete examples from research, development and film production, the talk explores how generative systems and analytical tools are beginning to transform different stages of cinematic work, from project development and archival research to image generation, archive analysis, scriptwriting and editing.
The presentation builds on practical experience developed in recent years through Artefacto, a Barcelona-based laboratory and audiovisual production company that explores the intersections between cinema, artificial intelligence and the critical analysis of technology. Through research and production projects presented at venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival and CPH:DOX, this work seeks to understand how AI tools can be integrated into cinematic processes without reducing cinema to a mere question of automation or technical efficiency.
In this context, several case studies will be presented that make it possible to observe how these technologies operate in practice. These include recent projects such as Membrana, research on memory and archives such as Atlas of Disappearance, and interactive explorations of digital labour and data economies such as Yet the Faces. These projects make it possible to analyse how artificial intelligence can function both as a creative tool and as an analytical instrument for studying images, narratives and systems of production.
Based on these examples, the session focuses on the aesthetic, epistemological and political questions that these technologies open up for cinema. What happens to fundamental notions of cinematic language — such as index, evidence or memory — when images can be generated synthetically? How are the regimes of truth historically associated with documentary cinema transformed? What new tensions emerge between simulation, reconstruction and archive when generative systems make it possible to produce plausible images of events that were never filmed?
The talk also addresses how these tools reconfigure authorship, creative labour and the infrastructures of audiovisual production. The emergence of generative models, automated script analysis systems and audiovisual synthesis tools is reshaping the division of labour within the industry and raising new questions about intellectual property, collective creative processes and cultural economies.
Finally, the session proposes cinema as a laboratory from which to think critically about these transformations. Cinema, historically understood as a technology of recording, memory and knowledge, offers a privileged field for examining the cultural effects of artificial intelligence. From this perspective, the talk explores how these tools are reshaping our relationship with images, archives and the forms of knowledge that cinema has produced for more than a century, while also opening new possibilities for film research, aesthetic experimentation and the critical production of images.
FRIDAY MAY 1 – 19:00h | Sala 3 | Entrada libre