Exploring the QCD vacuum - (some) recent developments in confinement and topology

I start by giving a brief overview over new developments in the area of confinement and topology. As an example for the interrelations between topological objects, instantons at finite temperature are discussed. Then I focus on new insights into the structure of the QCD vacuum obtained through filtering methods, in particular those based on decompositions w.r.t. fermionic eigenmodes.