Social media form a space within which the most trivial everyday experiences can not only be shared, but also staged and marketed in terms of beauty, perfection, and effectivity. Influencers never have bad days – at least they don’t publish Instagram photos of them. While the trend to excessively optimized self-presentation may pass, our emotional bond with digital devices and platforms, as well as the attendant economization of social relations, has long since penetrated all areas of life. Increasingly differentiated evaluation and control of user behavior enables applications which, as Harald Welzer writes, promise relief from our merely human, all-too-deficient capabilities. It effectively constitutes a colonial regime that imposes internalization of the given order in the forms of self-constraint and self-compulsion. Employing autoethnography, performance, and satire, the films in Self Share explore ambivalent YouTube phenomena, selfie culture, and artificial intelligence, playing with attempts to escape algorithmic norms through waywardness.

Subsequently, a talk will take place with Sylvie Boisseau, Frank Westermeyer, and Tobias Yves Zintel, moderated by Florian Wüst.