Education

An online session of the DocuPro programme at Docudays UA (Ukraine) with Anna Giralt Gris and Jorge Caballero, co-founders of Artefacto. Drawing on concrete case studies, they address what AI can bring to archive work, research, restoration, transcription and search; its use in pre-production and production —translation, subtitling, voice-over, dubbing—; and the legal and ethical stakes (rights, transparency, energy footprint). Followed by a Q&A.

Second edition of Sessions Artefacto, a professional gathering at the Artefacto studio dedicated to exploring the integration of computational models and machine learning into audiovisual creation. From the 3rd edition onwards, Sessions will run together with Cuerpos Conectados (University of Barcelona), a research and artistic-practice project on self-representation, identity construction and its social impact in audiovisual and transmedia creation around the body and identity.

A 40-hour course on artificial intelligence applied to the film industry from a critical and ethical perspective. It covers the evolution of AI in cinema, its impact on content generation and its ethical challenges, combining theory and practice —audiovisual analysis and text, image, video and sound generation— with case studies, workshops and collective reflection to apply it to your own projects.

Workshop held with the AI + Documentary Working Group, the joint initiative between the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab and WITNESS, the human rights media organisation.

The group has been working since 2018 on the intersections between artificial intelligence and non-fiction, through research, publications, speaker series and advocacy that includes submissions to the United Nations. It brings together technologists, documentarians, artists, policy makers and human rights advocates to examine how AI is changing documentary practice, how it affects creative integrity and the spread of misinformation, and how a documentarian can work with these tools while covering the industry that produces them.

Artefacto’s session concentrated on that last point, which is where the uncomfortable part of the question sits. Using a technology and keeping the distance needed to report on it calls for concrete decisions about what gets generated, what is declared to the viewer and what material is better left untouched.

The group has opened its monthly meetings to a wider informal membership and maintains an open resource base of readings, films, projects and tools.

A lecture and workshop by Anna Giralt Gris and Jorge Caballero at the Netherlands Film Academy (Amsterdam, 13–14 November 2025) on the future of documentary cinema in the age of AI. Part of AI Greenhouse, a collaboration with AIxDESIGN for a responsible and creative use of AI in film. It includes the lecture «Cinema Thinking Through Machines» and a hands-on workshop on documentary integrity and ethics working with AI tools.

Workshop on the uses and possibilities of artificial intelligence in the audiovisual sector, held in Barcelona with PROA, the Federation of Audiovisual Producers.

The session has an associated podcast, the ninth episode of Veus de l’Audiovisual, hosted by Jordi B. Oliva, president of PROA, in which Anna Giralt Gris and Jorge Caballero discuss the shift that the arrival of AI is bringing to audiovisual production.

The conversation covers three fronts. What it means for the industry to automate repetitive processes, which is where the technology is already producing measurable results. Which tools actually work today, beyond the announcements, separating those that have entered real workflows from those still at the demonstration stage. And what happens when the decision to greenlight a production depends on an algorithm, which is the part that bears directly on producers.

The approach is constructive and critical at once, in line with the work Artefacto has been doing with these tools inside film projects for years.

Conversation within Zinemaldia & Technology, the San Sebastián Festival strand devoted to the relationship between cinema and technology, on more inclusive and representative technologies in the audiovisual field.

The panel is moderated by AC Coppens, with Anna Giralt Gris, filmmaker and co-founder of Artefacto, alongside Selva González and Adriana Moscoso, of GESAC, the European grouping of authors’ and composers’ societies.

The framing reaches beyond artificial intelligence. The underlying question is which technologies the sector is adopting, who decides which ones, and who those decisions leave out. Systems are trained on existing material, and existing material carries the representation imbalances the sector has been discussing for decades. Once that bias is automated it stops being a revisable editorial choice and starts working as invisible infrastructure.

The presence of GESAC also places the discussion on the ground of authorship rights, where much of the European regulatory framework for the coming years is being decided.

As part of Festival Gabo (Bogotá), Artefacto took part with two activities: a workshop on the use of artificial intelligence in audiovisual production and an Opendocs programme conversation with Jorge Carrión, reviewing four of the project’s short films and the role of new technologies in documentary.

Online workshop within Art Meets Tech, the Goethe-Institut series on the crossings between artistic practice and technology, led by Anna Giralt Gris, filmmaker, producer and co-founder of Artefacto.

The session traced how artificial intelligence has settled into every stage of documentary production. In research, the tools make it possible to analyse volumes of material that used to be out of reach, to recognise patterns across archive holdings and to resolve transcription and translation in a fraction of the time. In narrative development, machine learning models propose structures drawn from earlier patterns. On the visual side, image generation, deepfakes and automated editing open new ways of reconstructing and cutting footage.

The second half turned to the questions those capabilities carry with them, which are the same ones that run through Artefacto’s work. How far a generated image can intervene in a documentary without misleading the viewer, and what happens to authorship once part of the process is automated.

It was held in English, in an open format with room for discussion and for contact between European professionals working along these lines.

UAB online course, part of the Master’s in Theory and Practice of Creative Documentary, introducing and analysing how artificial intelligence is transforming filmmaking. It combines a theoretical strand —key concepts at the intersection of cinema and technology, with an emphasis on AI and its ethical implications— with a practical one based on open models and neural networks. Three editions were held; coordinated by Virginia Luzón, Anna Giralt Gris and Jorge Caballero Ramos.

Talk at Picture This, the Copenhagen conference on the future of audiovisual production, about how independent directors and studios are bringing artificial intelligence and virtual production into their creative and business processes.

The 2024 edition took place on 24 September at the Royal Danish Library under the title Small Hacks, Big Wins, and put a very concrete question to the sector at that moment. Studios and production companies of every size were looking for affordable, unorthodox routes to make small-scale work perform like the large productions of previous years.

That is the ground Artefacto moves on comfortably, because small scale has been the starting condition of its projects and technology has always come in out of necessity rather than enthusiasm. The conference was an occasion to compare tools and workflows with people solving the same problems in northern Europe.

Workshop on creation with artificial intelligence given at Tabakalera, the international centre for contemporary culture in San Sebastián, across three consecutive mornings.

SerendipIA approached generative tools through the controlled chance that gives the session its name. Serendipity, the find that turns up while looking for something else, describes fairly well what happens when working with these models, and the workshop started there to take participants from initial curiosity to a practice with judgement behind it.

The format, three two-hour sessions, allowed demonstration and hands-on work to alternate, so that those attending left having tested the tools on their own material rather than having watched them run.

It forms part of Tabakalera’s film and audiovisual programme and of the training strand Artefacto maintains with cultural institutions, aimed at bringing these tools to creators working outside technical environments.

A session co-designed and presented by Artefacto at Sunny Side of the Doc (La Rochelle), structured as a presentation, case study and roundtable. Its core was a mapping of the uses of AI in documentary —recreating the past, accessing inaccessible places, representing inner mental states and speculating about the future— built from the OpenDocs projects and the +Rain festival films.

A theoretical-practical workshop led by Jorge Caballero and Jorge Carrión within Rodando Páginas, aimed at writers, screenwriters, producers and students. It explores language models (LLMs) and their applications in creative and technical writing: after a theoretical introduction and a case study, the final part is hands-on, experimenting with practical tools to apply AI to one’s own projects.

A workshop at L’Alternativa (CCCB) placing the body at the centre of the cinematic act: through the exploration of bodily rhythms and movements it seeks their translation into the generation of images, audio and text, and puts into practice non-rational editing methods —sensory tests, circadian rhythms, body transducers— using open source and AI systems.

A masterclass within Sitges Industry (Catalonia International Fantastic Film Festival) on how artificial intelligence is redefining film production: from process automation to creative content generation, reviewing the most advanced tools, their practical applications and what they mean for film professionals. Led by Anna Giralt Gris.

Participation in the CVEU Workshop (AI for Creative Video Editing and Understanding), held within the ICCV 2023 congress in Paris, bringing together researchers, artists and entrepreneurs around computer vision and machine learning applied to audiovisual creation. Anna Giralt Gris and Jorge Caballero gave the artistic keynote ‘Does AI Cinema Truly Exist?’.

Participation in the Alternate Realities Summit at Sheffield DocFest, the day the festival devotes each year to immersive and interactive storytelling.

The summit brings creators, artists and industry professionals together for a full day to discuss where the field is moving. It sits within Alternate Realities, the festival programme that gathers innovative non-fiction in all its forms and includes a freely accessible exhibition at Site Gallery across the festival dates.

Sheffield DocFest is one of the European spaces where expanded documentary is discussed with an industry frame rather than only an experimental one, which makes it a useful place to test Artefacto’s work against people producing in comparable formats. The conversation in this edition turned on the trends entering the field and on the practical difficulty of sustaining interactive projects inside funding structures designed for linear documentary.

A theoretical-practical workshop experimenting with moving images through open source and artificial-intelligence algorithms, within Extremlab. Participants go through a systematic process of working with images, from classification and organisation to automatic generation via neural networks and computational processes. Led by Anna Giralt Gris and Jorge Caballero, followed by a screening of ‘El síndrome de los quietos’.

Workshop on artificial intelligence tools applied to creativity, given in Lima as part of MUTA, the International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation.

MUTA works specifically with found footage, re-editing and the reuse of other people’s material, a terrain where machine learning tools fit almost naturally. Recognising, classifying and retrieving images inside a large archive is exactly the kind of task these systems handle well, and audiovisual appropriation has been solving it by hand for decades.

The workshop was set up as a practical introduction for creators, across three sessions in July 2020, in the middle of cultural activity adapting to remote work.

It belongs to the training strand Artefacto and Gusano Films develop in Latin America, which has passed through the Cinemateca de Bogotá, DOCSDF in Mexico and festivals in the region interested in the crossing between archive, technology and documentary creation.

Workshop on creativity and artificial intelligence organised by the Cinemateca de Bogotá together with Gusano Films, aimed at creators from different disciplines.

The call, titled Artificio, combined a general overview of artificial intelligence with practical work. Each participant developed an individual project across the sessions using Runway, so that the training ended in a piece of their own rather than in a demonstration.

It was led by Jorge Caballero, co-founder of Gusano Films, based in Barcelona and Bogotá, whose films and immersive and interactive projects have been awarded and selected at international festivals, and who has twice won Colombia’s National Documentary Award. He teaches and tutors expanded documentary on the Master’s in Theory and Practice of Creative Documentary at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and has given workshops at Latin American festivals including DOCSDF in Mexico.

This workshop belongs to the training strand Artefacto and Gusano have been developing in Latin America, aimed at putting the tool in the hands of those who create rather than only those who program.

Round table at Fundación Foto Colectania, within DONE’s Unsupervised Imaginations programme, on photography’s move from the digital state to the computational one.

The panel brought together Jorge Caballero and Anna Giralt Gris, filmmakers, teachers and researchers, with Vasily Zubarev, a software developer with more than a decade of work in computer vision and machine learning. It was moderated by the photographer and visual artist Roc Herms.

The session started from an uncomfortable observation. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, datasets, neural networks, adversarial images and deepfakes are terms that already bear on the daily work of anyone who produces images, and that most people handle without fully understanding what they do underneath. The table set out to establish the ground for understanding that paradigm and to point to the structural changes AI was introducing in photography, and by extension in the sciences, in art and in practically any discipline that works with representation.

January 2020, months before generative tools reached the general public, which makes this conversation a useful record of where the discussion stood before the noise.

A seminar at Medialab Prado on the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the machine-learning algorithms used to make deepfakes. In her talk ‘Overview and Challenges of AI-Powered Image Generation’, Anna Giralt Gris reviews the state of synthetic image generation in art, its challenges and how to make these tools our own; the programme also includes a hands-on workshop.

Seminar on documentary film and artificial intelligence within DocumentaMadrid, built around a question that is easy to state and hard to answer. Whether machines can help us be more creative.

The programme ran in three parts. The first, led by Luba Elliott, curator, artist and researcher specialising in artificial intelligence in the creative industries, went through artists and works from contemporary art to show what was already being made with these tools. Elliott has collaborated with The Photographers’ Gallery, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and Google.

The second part, given by Jorge Caballero, filmmaker, teacher and researcher, focused on documentary and examined through concrete examples what automation allowed inside a real production. The third closed with an analysis of automatic processes applied to audiovisual writing.

The seminar set out to bring these concepts to a non-specialist audience at a moment, 2019, when the conversation about AI and creation was only beginning to leave technical circles.

A debate at the CCCB on the nature of automated artistic creation: augmented, simulated, supplanted or artificial creativity? Working from stories, poems, music or paintings generated with algorithms and neural networks, scientists and artists specialising in AI, philosophy, literature and robotics test the public’s ability to tell which works were made by humans and which by algorithms. With Anna Giralt Gris, Carme Torras, Lali Barrière and Pilar Dellunde; presented by Carles Sora.