Josep M. Català Domènech
Expanded Consciousness: Cinema and Artificial Imagination
If the essence of cinema lies in the image, and the image itself is a form of consciousness, then the emergence of Artificial Intelligence redefines both the act of imagining and the act of thinking. The relationship between cinema and AI goes beyond the generation of new visualities: it opens a space for reflection on an Artificial Imagination capable of transforming the very consciousness that cinema embodies and awakens. As Deleuze once proposed, cinema inaugurated a new image of thought; today, that insight is renewed through the appearance of an expanded consciousness – one no longer confined to the human mind but shared with systems that co-think alongside us. Within this horizon, foundational concepts such as montage, representation, and realism are reconfigured from a perspective that not only observes the world but also transforms the consciousness through which we imagine it. In this sense, 21st-century cinema becomes a privileged laboratory for exploring the transformative power of consciousness in dialogue with artificial imagination.
Dr. Josep M. Català Domènech is Professor Emeritus as well as former Dean of the Faculty of Communication Sciences and Academic Director of the Master's Degree in Creative Documentary of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Master of Arts in Film Theory from San Francisco State University. BA in Modern and Contemporary History from the University of Barcelona. Fundesco Essay Award. Essay Award from the 27th Irún Literary Competition. Award from the Spanish Association of Film Historians. He is the author of several books on visual studies, film, and documentary, as well as other topics related to image and thought. Notable recent publications include Essay Aesthetics (2014), Postdocumentary: The Imaginary Condition of Documentary Film (2021), Complexity and Baroque (2023), The Passion of the Visible: Félix Guattari and the Future of Cinema (2024), The Forms of the World: Space and Technologies of the Imagination (2025), and Artificial Imagination: The Image Beyond the Image (with Jorge Caballero, 2025).