#nofilter

The theme of the year 2025 takes the inconspicuous hashtag #nofilter, which is often used on social media such as Instagram, as an opportunity for a general questioning of the present. The initial observation or working hypothesis is that immediacy, a lack of detachment and an insistence on authentic experiences are a sign of our times. This impression can be gained in the most diverse areas of culture; for example, in newer social media applications such as "BeReal", in reality TV shows, in the Instagramisation of everyday life through to the disturbing live streams of war and violent excesses. In addition to the lack of distance in temporal, spatial and emotional terms that prevails here, the "realness primacy" of hip-hop culture seems like a harmless cliché. In contemporary literature, for example, an almost extractivist relationship to the actual reality of life can be observed. When the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård describes his novel cycles as a "personal encyclopaedia of things from my immediate surroundings", this is also accompanied by a violent indiscretion - to the point of exploiting the lives of others as literary material. The literary scholar Anna Kornbluh describes it similarly. She speaks of a transition to unfiltered immediacy, which she recently analysed as a new cultural style: "Immediacy as self-substantiation metabolises many flights of late-twentieth-century theory: authentications of situated knowing, elevations of personal experience, suspicions of grand narratives, transpositions of politics into ethos, and promotion of autoethnography across the disciplines." This includes areas such as marketing, education, self-help groups and even university creative writing courses. They all follow a culture of speaking truth and immediacy, which in Kornbluh's eyes has grown into a kind of confession industry. In academia, as the legal and political scientist Bernard Harcourt put it, "every one of us must write in the first person". Kornbluh calls this "unrepresentative personalism" in which everyone becomes an "epistemic silo".

The appeal to the immediate, somatically and affectively felt reality, which was made strong by feminist theory and marginalised anti-racist, indigenous and queer groups for good reasons and also found expression in rich performative practices - above all to help one's own dissident point of view gain social justice - has been expanded to include a radicalised here and now. In academic circles, this focus on one's own situational somatic sensibility goes hand in hand with widespread hyper-awareness.

The field of politics also seems to be caught up in this new kind of transfiguration of unmediatedness, which seems to be increasingly immunising itself against objectifying arguments, second or third-order observations (as the sociologist Niklas Luhmann would call them) or representations. But what is so tempting about the evidence of subjective impressions and one's own involvement? What is so attractive about articulating them directly and "unfiltered" in the here and now - like Claudia Roth's tweet at the Berlinale? Is it about - as the director of the Anne Frank Educational Centre put it - primarily manifesting the significance of one's own point of view in a hyperactive political statement market instead of engaging in an argument?

As part of the annual theme outlined here, we would like to examine the phenomenon of immediacy, realness and lifeness not only through media, art, literature and film examples. The events will examine the widest possible range of phenomena: from (young) artists who feel compelled to constantly communicate their own person and state of mind, to the hyperactive activist mode of political debate, in which divergent world views clash abruptly, irreconcilably and full of resentment, to the contrasting relationship between the desire for authenticity and "unrepresentative personalism", the "unrepresentative personalism" and the rapid developments of artificial intelligence with its deep fakes, its digital filters and its possibilities of merely feigning unfiltered authenticity.

What exactly is expressed in the desire for the immediate here-and-now experience? What does the constant need to present oneself directly and as truthfully as possible in public have to do with a thoroughly digitalised present? What is articulated in the new hyper-awareness that is more than the reproduction of prefabricated psychologisms, such as those fabricated by the icons of reality television and how-to literature? What access do we even have to our own sensibilities?

One of the paradoxes of the immediacy phenomenon is that it has to be staged. What's more, considerable effort is required to articulate an immediate experience.

We assume that the dictum of immediacy is more than just a narcissistic rebellion of a selfie-obsessed generation-me. We therefore want to ask which aesthetics are used to stage immediacy, immersiveness, radical contemporaneity and authenticity. How is immediacy conveyed? Is there a mediality of immediacy? And is there immediacy in the digital?

Overview of the lectures