Link to the Film

Film runtime: 35 minutes 
Langauge(s): English, German, and Deutsche Gebärdensprache (DGS)
Research, Script, Direction, Cinematography, Editing & Sound Design: Chayan Sonane

A Note of Gratitude

I want to thank my supervisors, Prof. Hartmann and Prof. Gellert, for their critique, for pushing me, and for allowing space to fail, question, and experiment. To Prof. Dr. Michael Hohl, for his incisive advice and documentary recommendations. To Alberto, for his engaging classes and conversations on storytelling. To my friends, and all those I interviewed, both on and off the record, for their trust and time. I am also grateful to the John Cage Organ Foundation (Halberstadt), Forward Dance Company (Leipzig), and Making a Difference (Berlin) for their direct and indirect support, resources, and guidance throughout the process and beyond.

This project has been shaped not only by research and effort, but by the people and encounters that made it possible.

1. Introduction

Cage preparing a piano, in 1947 Photograph by Irving Penn © 1947

1.1 Background & Motivation

This project began with a question I didn’t quite know how to ask: Why are we so impatient with people, but so fascinated by slowness in art?

I first encountered the work of John Cage during a moment of curiosity: a search for the absurd. His performance Water Walk was chaotic, unexpected, and almost silly on the surface. But the more I watched it, the more I noticed its precision and control. This strange balance of randomness and structure drew me in. It reminded me that absurdity often hides something deeper underneath.

Later, I discovered Cage’s musical composition As Slow As Possible, which is being performed on an organ in Halberstadt over 639 years. Yes, 639 years. Just that idea: to stretch time that far, seemed both radical and poetic to me. I traveled to Halberstadt and spoke to the people behind the project. Their commitment to the piece wasn’t just about music. It was about patience, dedication, and trust in something much larger than ourselves.

We often celebrate slowness when it appears in art, like in meditative films or ambient music. But when slowness is embodied, when someone moves or speaks slowly because of a disability, our reaction is often discomfort, annoyance, or exclusion. That disconnect bothered me. This led me to reflect on my own discomforts, too. I live with a learning disability, and I have often felt frustrated by my own pace or the way it doesn't match what is expected. In this project, I wanted to give space to those feelings, but also to the beauty that can come from slowing down. In documenting slowness in others and in myself, I hope to open up new ways of understanding time, ability, and care.

So this thesis, and the film that accompanies it, is a way to look at these contradictions. To sit with them. To ask why we accept slowness in some forms, but not in others. And to try and explore what it means to be slow, different, or even “impossible” in a world that moves fast.

Still from The Great Moose Migration (Slow TV) © SVT via AP 2025

1.2 Research Objectives

This project doesn’t aim to give all the answers, but rather to open up space for reflection and discussion. My main goals were:

• To explore the meaning of slowness across different fields: art, music, film, disability, and daily life.
• To question how society perceives and responds to people who move, communicate, or function differently.
• To connect artistic experiments (like As Slow As Possible or Slow TV) with real-world experiences of disabled individuals.
• To document this exploration through a film that is both research and reflection: an audiovisual thesis.
• To test the possibilities of using film as a tool for design research and critical thinking.

1.3 Research Questions

From these objectives, a few key questions guide the project:

• Why is slowness embraced in some cultural contexts (like music or experimental film), but seen as a limitation in others (like disability)?
• Can film be used not just to represent slowness, but to feel it?
• What do people with disabilities teach us about time, movement, and patience?
• How do artistic practices like those of John Cage help us rethink our assumptions about ability and pace?
• What happens when the unusual, whether a musical performance or a human experience, becomes the lens through which we observe the everyday?

Burchardi Church in Halberstadt © Gordon Welters for The New York Times

1.4 Scope & Limitations

This thesis takes the form of a written document alongside a short film. While it draws from different fields, design, film, anthropology, and disability studies, it doesn’t claim to be an academic authority on all of them. Instead, it aims to build bridges between them through storytelling and personal encounters.

The project is based primarily in Germany, with fieldwork in Halberstadt and Berlin, and interviews with people working across performance, disability rights, and sound. It is limited by the scale of a master’s project, in time, access, and resources.

Also, it’s important to note that I don’t identify as disabled in the traditional sense, but I do live with learning disabilities and mental health struggles that have shaped how I experience time, communication, and care. This project reflects that subjectivity, rather than trying to speak for anyone else.

Ultimately, this is a personal project that tries to stay open. It isn’t definitive. It’s as slow as possible: a provocation, a question, and a listening practice.

2. Context & Theoretical Grounding

Shannon Finnegan, Do you want us here or not , 2021 © Axel Schneider

2.1 Film as Temporal Resistance

The medium of film has long been associated with time: it is, at its core, a time-based art form. As such, filmmakers have the power to stretch, compress, repeat, and manipulate time in ways that both reflect and challenge our lived experience. In mainstream cinema, this temporal manipulation is usually in service of narrative efficiency. Editing techniques like continuity editing, montage, and jump cuts are used to propel the story forward, mimicking the pace of modern life. But in experimental and avant-garde film, time is often used differently; not to replicate the rhythms of the everyday, but to resist them. This concept, which can be referred to as „temporal resistance,“ plays a key role in understanding the theoretical basis of this thesis.

Temporal resistance is not simply about slowness; it is about drawing attention to time as an aesthetic and political choice. Filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Abbas Kiarostami have used long takes and minimal editing to create a heightened awareness of duration. Their films often ask the viewer to sit with discomfort, boredom, or stillness; all states that challenge the dominant cultural narratives of productivity and speed.

Akerman's „Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles“ (1975), for instance, is a three-hour film that meticulously documents the daily routine of a housewife. The film's slow pace and repetitive structure are not just stylistic choices; they are political. They foreground the invisibility of women's labour, the tyranny of domestic time, and the alienation embedded in everyday repetition.

In the thesis project, I draw on this lineage while allowing room for contradiction. While the film “As Slow As Possible” is not consistently slow in form, it borrows and tests these strategies in key sections. These formal strategies were not the sole driving force of the film but served as tools of investigation, especially where slowness intersects with social experience, ability, and care. I have used long takes in certain sequences and avoided excessive editing in others, but at the same time, some parts remain paced or conversational. What matters is the spirit of temporal inquiry, not the dogma of duration.

The last two decades have seen a growing interest in what critics have termed „slow cinema.“ This movement, while not formally organised, includes filmmakers who favour long takes, minimal dialogue, and contemplative pacing. Critics such as Jonathan Romney (2004) and Matthew Flanagan (2008) have noted the emergence of this aesthetic as a response to the hyperkinetic editing and narrative density of mainstream media. But slowness in contemporary cinema is more than just an aesthetic rebellion; it is also a mode of attention, reflection, and sometimes provocation.

Slow cinema works by disrupting our habitual modes of perception. Films by Tsai Ming-liang, Lav Diaz, Béla Tarr, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul do not reward the viewer with easy catharsis or linear resolution. Instead, they demand presence. The viewer must commit to the duration, to the repetition, to the silence. This slowness invites a different kind of watching; one that is open-ended, durational, and embodied. It creates room for contemplation, empathy, and even discomfort.

In this context, slowness becomes a way of making space: for uncertainty, for discomfort, for beauty, or even boredom. My work engages with this idea not always in form, but in intention. I was deeply interested in how such an aesthetic approach could apply to different themes and encounters. I experimented with these strategies in moments where they felt true, like in the Vipassana camp, analogue photo sequences or the documentation of the organ’s note change in Halberstadt. But this aesthetic wasn’t imposed on every frame. Instead, it was one tool among many in an eclectic and essayistic film structure.

More central than the form was the question: what happens when we refuse to rush? Whether filming everyday gestures of someone with a disability, documenting the long note of a 639-year musical performance, or listening to silence through Cage’s lens, slowness helped create a shared space of attention. Even where the shots are not slow, the film itself often circles slow subjects or invites slow thinking.

2.2 Disability and the Question of Ability

Disability studies, particularly in its intersection with critical design, anthropology, and performance theory, offers a rich framework for rethinking normative ideas about time, productivity, and value. Scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1997), Alison Kafer (2013), and Lennard J. Davis (2006) have questioned the cultural assumptions that frame disability as a lack, rather than a difference. These critiques have implications for how we think about time.

One of the foundational concepts in critical disability theory is „crip time.“ As articulated by Kafer and others, crip time refers to the flexible, non-linear, and often unpredictable ways that disabled people experience time. It challenges the rigid structures of able-bodied time that govern work schedules, education systems, and media formats. In a world that prioritises speed and efficiency, disabled people are often rendered out of sync. This disjuncture is not just a logistical problem; it is a deeply political one. It exposes the ways in which normative time functions as a mechanism of exclusion.

In this context, slowness becomes a form of resistance and reparation. By centering disabled experiences of time, we begin to question the very foundations of what it means to be productive, coherent, or legible. This thesis takes this idea seriously, using film not to „represent“ disabled people, but to collaborate with them in creating new temporalities. The camera does not hurry them; it waits, adjusts, listens. Whether it is capturing a conversation in sign language or the slow physical movement of someone using a wheelchair, the film resists the impulse to rush, compress, or clarify. It embraces the time that is needed.

This approach also critiques the ways in which slowness is aestheticized in high art, while being pathologized in everyday life. A nine-hour Norwegian train ride becomes celebrated as „slow TV,“ but a disabled person taking longer to board that train may be seen as a burden. The film asks: why do we celebrate slowness in art, but stigmatize it in people?

2.3 Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1964)

Andy Warhol's Sleep (1964) is a five-hour-and-twenty-minute silent film composed entirely of extended shots of poet John Giorno asleep. The film is considered one of the earliest and most radical examples of slow cinema. By presenting the act of sleeping as its sole subject, Warhol defies all conventional expectations of filmic entertainment, action, and narrative development. The camera lingers on the minute details of Giorno’s body at rest: the slow rise and fall of his chest, the occasional twitch of a limb, the shifting of light across skin. Viewers are forced into an unusual contract, either to leave or to stay and radically slow down their expectations of cinema.

This film significantly contributes to the thesis's argument about slowness as both aesthetic and ideological. Warhol doesn’t merely document time passing; he insists on it. The absence of music, dialogue, and traditional narrative techniques turns attention inward, both on the subject (Giorno) and on the viewer’s own habits of perception. In a culture conditioned by attention deficit, Sleep is a provocation. As the viewer moves from boredom to attention to reflection, the film begins to question what constitutes engagement. 

The refusal to “entertain” becomes a statement: what if the purpose of cinema isn’t action or emotion, but presence? Warhol's approach also lays a foundation for how time is framed in this thesis. While my film As Slow As Possible does not emulate Sleep in visual style or execution, it shares a kinship in the radical deceleration of time. In one of the experimental chapters, analogue photographs are held onscreen for longer than expected, inviting the viewer to observe light, texture, and silence. Like Warhol, I am interested in how duration, not action, can be the source of meaning. The aesthetics of stillness, rest, and boredom are no longer byproducts but central motifs that reveal our cultural discomfort with non-productivity.

Sleep also complicates the boundary between public and private, between spectacle and intimacy. By placing something as mundane and sacred as sleep onto a gallery screen, Warhol invites us to look at vulnerability. Giorno, while passive, becomes monumental. This form of radical visibility parallels some of the concerns in my own project: how do we frame bodies that do not conform to expected tempos, rhythms, or visual norms? Who do we allow to be slow, and under what terms?

2.4 Charlie Shackleton’s Paint Drying (2016)

Paint Drying (2016) by Charlie Shackleton is a ten-hour-long unbroken shot of white paint drying on a wall. Ostensibly mundane and uneventful, the film was created as a form of protest against the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which requires filmmakers to pay for mandatory classification regardless of content or intent. Shackleton decided to weaponise the BBFC's own rules against them, forcing them to sit through ten hours of literal paint drying. The act was both defiant and performative, transforming tedium into resistance.

Unlike Warhol’s meditative Sleep, Paint Drying begins from a place of irritation. The film is not interested in beauty or presence but in absurdity and bureaucracy. However, its implications for this thesis are critical. First, it suggests that slowness can be weaponised, not just to soothe or mesmerise but to confront and destabilise. The film deliberately wastes institutional time. This is crucial for As Slow As Possible, which resists both cinematic convention and bureaucratic clarity. What does it mean to make a film that feels too long, too quiet, or too confusing, not because of aesthetic laziness, but as a form of protest against ableist and capitalist metrics of value?

Secondly, Paint Drying draws attention to spectatorship. In interviews, Shackleton remarked on how the BBFC’s mandatory watch of the entire film became part of the artwork itself. In this way, it is not just a film but a performance, one in which the viewer (or institution) becomes the subject. Similarly, in my project, the moments of protracted silence, visual stillness, or ambiguous narration are not accidents but strategies. They implicate the viewer, forcing them to confront their expectations about accessibility, engagement, and narrative.

Importantly, Paint Drying subverts labour and authorship. The film’s subject is laboriously slow, but the labour lies not in its creation, but in its viewing. This reversal is particularly resonant in disability contexts. A person who takes more time to speak or move often carries the burden of adjustment. But what if we reoriented our gaze, as Shackleton does, and made the act of waiting the central task? Who, then, is working? This question reverberates through my film, particularly in scenes with disabled subjects who speak, move, or emote differently, raising the possibility that slowness is not a deficit but a recalibration of attention.

3. John Cage: Ideas, Scores, and Narration

John Cage (1912 - 1992) shows a photo of himself from the early 1980s © imago/Leemage

3.1 Chance Operations

One of John Cage’s most radical contributions to 20th-century music and art is the idea of “chance operations.” Rather than composing in a traditional linear fashion, Cage introduced randomness into his process. For instance, using tools like the I Ching (an ancient Chinese divination system) to make decisions about pitch, rhythm, and duration. For Cage, the goal was not to express personal emotion or intention but to remove the self from the process entirely. This decentralisation of the artist disrupted longstanding norms about authorship and control, making room for uncertainty, indeterminacy, openness and often unusual results.

In the context of As Slow As Possible, chance operations offer a method as well as a metaphor. The film’s structure was never rigidly scripted but evolved in response to unpredictable encounters: a professor’s impromptu lecture at his kitchen table, a dancer’s availability, a protest missed, or a malfunctioning recorder. This wasn’t a flaw in the research process; it was the process. Channelling Cage, I allowed the project’s shape to emerge from these lived contingencies. In a way, the project became a collaboration between intention and interruption.

Chance also operated in the encounter with Prof. Neugebauer’s wife, Martje Hansen, a linguist and sign language user. Her presence in the project was entirely unplanned, but her input reshaped key portions of the narrative. She acted as an interpreter, a philosophical interlocutor, and in some ways, a silent co-author. Cage’s embrace of accident becomes useful here, not just as a compositional technique, but as an ethical orientation: to stay open, to allow things to emerge rather than force coherence.

Beyond method, chance operations also destabilise time. Without predictability or teleology, Cage’s scores invite listeners (and viewers) to dwell in uncertainty. Similarly, my film asks its audience to wait without a guarantee: Will something happen? Will this resolve? Is it finished? This ambiguity mirrors disabled temporality, where time may be discontinuous, fragmented, or cyclical, and thus further connects the aesthetic strategy to the film’s core theme.

3.2 Silence and 4′33″

Cage’s 4′33″ (1952) is arguably his most famous and controversial work. It consists of three movements during which the performer plays nothing. The piece is not about absence but presence, of ambient sound, of the audience’s shifting body, of breath and rustle. 4′33″ reframes silence not as the lack of sound, but as a field of possibility. It challenges the idea that art must deliver content and instead reveals how context and perception are generative.

In As Slow As Possible, silence plays an equally disruptive role. There are sequences in the film, especially those featuring sign language or analogue stills, where silence becomes a full participant. But like Cage, the silence is not passive. It contains tension, history, and resistance. For example, the interview with Rita Mazza, a deaf dancer, is shot in complete silence except for the note from Organ² / ASLSP that accompanies her. Her hands, her face, her gestures become the sound. The viewer must recalibrate their attention, not to what is being said, but to how it is being signed.

This reorientation is Cageian in spirit, insisting that silence is never empty, only differently full. Furthermore, silence in the film is used to confront discomfort. Mainstream cinema fills every moment with sound, music, voiceover, and ambient track to guide emotion and avoid uncertainty. My project deliberately withdraws these cues. The silence following a difficult story, or the long pause in an uncomfortable situation, is not entirely edited out. They remain. They press. Like 4′33″, they ask: what are you hearing, when no one is speaking? What lives in the pause?

Silence also aligns with care. In disability communities, silence can mean space, patience, and accommodation. Cage’s radical gesture becomes, in this context, a form of ethical listening. To let someone finish. To wait. To witness without interruption. In this way, 4′33″ becomes more than music; it becomes a model for interaction, for filmmaking, and for being with others.

3.3 Avant-Garde Influences

Cage was part of a larger avant-garde movement that spanned not only music but visual art, literature, performance, and philosophy. He collaborated with Merce Cunningham in dance, was close with Robert Rauschenberg in visual art, and engaged deeply with Zen Buddhism. His approach blurred the lines between disciplines and questioned the very nature of what art could be. In the same spirit, my project resists categorisation. It is not strictly a documentary, nor a performance, nor an ethnographic essay, but something that spills across all these forms. This impulse owes much to Cage and his community of radical interdisciplinarians.

The avant-garde, particularly in postwar America and Europe, sought to collapse form and function. Art was not about aesthetic pleasure but confrontation, play, irritation. Cage’s lectures (such as “Lecture on Nothing”) use repetition, silence, and typography to unmake the very idea of a linear argument. These methods inspired my voiceover script, fragments, interruptions, and playful reversals. The narration doesn’t explain; it suggests. It’s not informative but performative.

“Avant-garde” is often used too loosely, but in Cage’s case, it’s appropriate. He was ahead of his time, not in the sense of anticipating trends, but in rejecting the entire framework of linear progress. He didn’t believe in arriving at a destination. He believed in being where you are. This spirit informed the structure of the film. Rather than following a traditional arc, As Slow As Possible is built as a sequence of chapters, reflections, and interruptions. There’s a prologue with Cage’s Water Walk, followed by experimental meditations on slowness, disability, and duration. There’s no single protagonist or message. Instead, the film meanders deliberately. Like Cage, it trusts that meaning will emerge through attention, not instruction.

The voiceover, narrated in a recreated John Cage voice, plays with this idea too. It’s not about impersonation. It’s about resonance. What would Cage notice if he came back today? Would he be fascinated by Slow TV? Would he see a disabled dancer’s performance as kin to his own experiments? Would he find the Halberstadt project beautiful, funny, or both?

3.4 Organ² / ASLSP and the Question of Duration

The film’s namesake, As Slow As Possible, is one of Cage’s most radical compositions. Originally written in 1985 for piano and later transcribed for organ, the piece comes with only one unusual instruction: to be played “as slow as possible.” In 2001, a group of musicians and theorists in Halberstadt, Germany, began performing the piece at an ultra-slow pace, so slow that it would last 639 years. The performance has become influential, celebrated as one of the longest artistic projects in human history.

This is not a metaphor. The organ plays one chord for months, sometimes years, before changing. The current tone is a suspended D4, which is also the emotional note that guides the film. The project doesn’t just stretch time; it inhabits it. It asks the listener to think in geologic, even cosmic scales. It disrupts the rhythms of consumption, efficiency, and immediacy.

This performance is at the centre of my film, not just because it’s unusual, but because it literalizes the idea that time can be stretched to absurdity. It shows that meaning does not require urgency. A single note can last months, or years, or more. A pause can become an event; especially in a culture of instant gratification.

In the film, my interview with Prof. Dr. Rainer O. Neugebauer, one of the minds behind the project, unpacks the philosophical and technical complexity of ASLSP. But even more than that, the visit to the church, the slowness of the organ’s tone, and the space’s stillness provided a kind of experiential grounding. The project isn’t about spectacle; it’s about stewardship.

Organ² / ASLSP also brings up questions of continuity and fragility. Can a work last for centuries? What does it mean to begin something you will never see completed? What happens when you know the piece will outlive you? When the end is 600 years away? How do we measure significance? How do we care for things we will never see completed? And how does art change when time is no longer something to conquer, but something to inhabit?

The ASLSP project is both deeply Cageian and entirely its own. It brings together slowness, absurdity, devotion, and community. In some ways, it’s the heart of this thesis; not because it explains everything, but because it refuses to. It just goes on.

3.5. Cage as the Narrator

Imagining John Cage as the narrator was not just a stylistic choice, but a conceptual intervention. It allowed the film to develop a unique tone, dry, philosophical, humorous, and unpredictable. His voice was built using an AI voice-cloning tool (ElevenLabs), with care taken to match the known texture, cadence, and tonal peculiarities of Cage’s archival recordings.

This decision reframes authorship. The filmmaker recedes into the background, allowing Cage to become a lens through which the world is filtered. But it’s not mimicry, it’s improvisation. The Cage we hear is speculative, contemporary, and reflective. He draws on known ideas from Cage’s writings and interviews, but comments on events he never lived through, people he never met.

The approach also challenges linear narration. Cage does not explain; he muses. He doesn’t always clarify; sometimes he contradicts. This ambiguity opens space for viewers to interpret. The narration becomes more like a score than a voice-over: structured but open to variation.

Choosing Cage as narrator also draws attention to power. Who gets to tell stories? By giving voice to a dead composer, the film makes space for a new kind of witness, one whose presence is neither objective nor neutral but playful and probing.

This narrative choice deepens the film’s exploration of time, voice, and mediation. The past speaks, but not as authority-as-a-co-performer.

Scriptwriting for As Slow As Possible did not follow a conventional timeline-based storyboard. Rather, it grew organically, rooted in the logic of themes, atmospheres, and Cageian contradictions. The narration was never intended to simply explain the visuals; it was designed to interrupt, drift, and converse with them. Instead of a linear voice guiding the audience, the narration floats across chapters, sometimes leading, lagging, and sometimes falling silent altogether. This sense of temporality, non-linear, overlapping, and suspended, is deliberate.

Voice-over Script

4. Halberstadt: Organ, Place, and People

4.1 Organ’s History in Halberstadt

The Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, a modest town in eastern Germany, is home to one of the most provocative musical performances ever attempted. But long before it became the site of Organ² / ASLSP, the church held centuries of spiritual and musical heritage. Built in the 11th century, it has witnessed war, reformation, decay, and now, an ambitious 639-year project that defies the logic of human lifespan and attention span. The organ itself had to be custom-built for the performance. Rather than an ornate, baroque relic, it is a stark, utilitarian structure, the pipes and mechanical parts designed to hold a single tone for years.

This organ is not only a musical instrument; it is a timekeeping device, a cultural monument, and a provocation. Its chord changes every few years, so rarely that each shift becomes a communal event. People travel from around the world to witness a note change that might last less than a minute. This act of waiting, of gathering around a sonic threshold, is profound. It reframes the role of music from performance to ritual, and of time from fleeting to monumental.

In the film, the organ is less a character than a pulse, always there, always sounding, reminding us that time can be both immediate and inconceivably vast. The Burchardi Church itself adds another layer of historical resonance to the piece. Once reduced to ruins and used as a pigsty, it has now been revived as a site of sonic experimentation and pilgrimage. The contrast between its physical past and its metaphysical present is striking. The space, with its worn stone floors and high ceilings, becomes a resonator not just of notes but of history, memory, and speculation. Its transformation underscores the film’s broader interest in how spaces evolve and how slowness can be an act of reclamation.

From an anthropological lens, the community surrounding the organ, including local volunteers, musicians, and tourists, forms a living ecosystem of ritual and continuity. The task of maintaining the performance is both mundane and sacred, creating a shared language among people who may otherwise have little in common. These human interactions around the instrument serve as a social microcosm for slowness.

4.2 The 639-Year Performance

The duration of the performance was not arbitrarily chosen. It symbolically corresponds to the 639 years between the construction of the first modern organ in Halberstadt (1361) and the year the performance began (2000). This framing turns the piece into an echo, not just of Cage’s compositional experiments, but of human and cultural history. It prompts us to consider the long arc of continuity: who will keep it going? Will someone be there to hear its final note in 2640?

In this context, ASLSP becomes more than a piece of music. It becomes a question of responsibility, legacy, and faith in collective memory. It also becomes a metaphor for disabled temporality. Just as the piece refuses conventional tempos, disabled lives often unfold on nonlinear, unpredictable timeframes. They resist the norm, not out of dysfunction but by design. The Halberstadt performance, like the people in my film, asks for patience, not pity, not awe, but presence. This slowness is not an absence; it is an alternative structure of time, one in which duration is not a burden but a mode of attention.

The technical challenges of the project also mirror those found in long-term caregiving or accessibility planning. The organ must be preserved, maintained, and tuned for generations, relying on knowledge transfer and institutional support. These infrastructural considerations make the project feel less like a concert and more like a long-form collaboration with time itself. My film reflects on this by showing not just the performance but the people and routines that sustain it.

Furthermore, the project’s reliance on long, sustained notes becomes a sonic metaphor for care work and persistence. Just as the organ sustains a single tone for months or years, so too do many people live through stretches of time defined not by drama but by endurance. In disability contexts, where care routines often go unseen or unacknowledged, the sheer visibility of this long note asserts value in persistence and repetition.

4.3 Meeting Prof. Rainer Neugebauer

Meeting Prof. Dr. Rainer O. Neugebauer was a guiding point in the research. An initiator and steward of the Halberstadt performance, Neugebauer’s presence is as rooted as the organ’s drone. He does not just explain the project, he lives it. When we spoke, it was not as scholar and student, but as two people interested in the implications of time, slowness, and memory. The interview was casual, filmed over tea in his home, with long, digressive conversations about Cage, ethics, and language.

Neugebauer's insights helped me move beyond seeing ASLSP as a spectacle and instead recognise it as a way of thinking. He explained how each note had to be planned years in advance, how volunteers were trained to take care of the project, and how funding and documentation required patience and clarity. These weren't obstacles; they were the structure. He offered an understanding of slowness that was not romantic or abstract, but logistical. For someone working on a film about disability and temporal resistance, this clarity was deeply affirming.

What made Neugebauer's presence particularly compelling was his ability to bridge theoretical reflection with practical insight. He didn’t just quote Cage or rehearse musicological jargon. He spoke with humility about how people make art last over centuries. That grounding, that realism, resonated with the themes of the film. Just as disabled subjects often live with constant negotiation between physical constraints and creative possibilities, so too does this performance exist in the tension between aspiration and regular maintenance.

Neugebauer’s tone was never didactic. Instead, he invited ambiguity and contradiction. One moment, he would explain musical structure; the next, he’d wonder aloud whether Cage would approve of the project. This openness to uncertainty, the ability to hold precision and doubt in the same breath, became a narrative model for the structure/voiceover and editing of the film.

The two main locations of our interview, the professor's home and the Burchardi Church, formed a dual narrative. At home, Neugebauer was informal, surrounded by books, plants, and an ambient quiet. At the church, his voice changed. He became quieter, reverent. The acoustics of the space seemed to demand it. We filmed our walk through the organ pipes, the stone floor beneath, and the pulsing hum of the chord then being played. These settings became characters in themselves. They weren’t just backdrops, but environments that held and shaped our dialogue.

These spatial shifts mirror the shifts in the film’s own narrative. At home, we speak of Cage’s ideas in conceptual terms, chance, duration, and aesthetics. At the church, those ideas became physical. The metal pipes, the air pumps, the dust, it all made Cage real. In the editing process, I deliberately resisted over-narrating these sequences. Instead, I let pauses linger. A bird sound, the wind, the professor’s slow movements, they became part of the rhythm. The scenes reflect Cage not by talking about him, but by becoming Cageian in form.

The scenes at the church also provided an opportunity to show how temporality and atmosphere intertwine. Shadows lengthen across the stone as we speak. Light filters through a stained-glass window. These small visual details, quiet, unhurried, yet deeply evocative, reaffirm that slowness can be immersive. Time doesn’t drag; it expands.

Our conversations extended beyond the topic of the performance. They touched on pedagogy, care, institutional memory, and the importance of absurdity. At one point, he talked about how we live in a time where everything must justify itself, quickly. Cage teaches us to wait without reason. That thought stayed with me and informed much of how I approached the film’s edit, especially in resisting the need to explain every scene or justify each cut.

In many ways, these conversations became a microcosm of the project as a whole. They were unscripted, open-ended, shaped by the moment and the space. And like Cage’s compositions, they left room for silence.

4.4 Martje Hansen: Signs, Chance, and Languages

My ‘chance meeting’ with Martje Hansen, a linguist and German Sign Language (DGS) user, was one of the most quietly pivotal moments of this project. I met her during filming at Prof. Dr. Neugebauer’s home. While she wasn’t part of the planned shooting schedule or a formal interview, her insight, attention, and generosity had a lasting impact on how I came to shape this work.

Martje spoke with me about the unique grammar, speed, and spatial structure of DGS. Her reflections on sign language opened up an entirely new temporal logic, one that isn’t built around spoken cadence but instead around gesture, visual space, and embodied rhythm. She encouraged me to think about slowness not only in terms of sound and movement but also in how language itself is structured and perceived.

Our conversations were informal, unrecorded, but deeply formative. In true Cagean spirit, they occurred by chance, without agenda. And just like that, one thing led to another: Martje connected me with DGS users and students who might be open to speaking with me or helping with my research.

Through this web of informal introductions, I eventually found my way to Rita Mazza, the deaf artist and performer who would later become a central presence in Chapter 1 of the film.

It’s impossible to overstate how Cage-like this progression felt. There was no formal outreach plan, no deliberate casting. Martje wasn’t part of my list of experts or collaborators. But her presence and her willingness to share became a living example of chance operations at work. The project shifted not through design, but through openness, through listening to the moment and following what it offered.

What I learned from Martje wasn’t only about sign language, it was about receptivity. That the ethics of working with slowness and disability aren’t just theoretical or visual; they are lived, interpersonal, and often unplanned. She reminded me that guidance can come in quiet forms, that collaboration isn’t always formalised, and that some of the most important contributions are the ones that remain off-screen.

5. Film Chapters

A sketch, mirroring the film’s chapters at the St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt

5.1. Chapter Zero: Prologue

The prologue of the film begins not with exposition, but with provocation. A performance of John Cage’s “Water Walk” plays across the screen, familiar to few, absurd to most. The visual chaos, rubber duck, blender, and bathtub set the tone, but what brings it into coherence is the narration. And not just any voice-over, but one spoken from the imagined voice of John Cage himself. Through voice-cloning and carefully written scriptwork, the film imagines Cage watching, interpreting, and reacting to a contemporary world saturated with Cageian gestures.

What might appear as chaos is soon reframed as something structured, imbued with intent, layered with rhythm, timing, and openness. This is precisely how Cage’s work functions, and how the prologue introduces viewers to the ethos that will shape the rest of the film. It also serves to bridge the historical and the present. By allowing “Cage” to narrate, the film collapses temporal distances, past performance and present experience are not separate but woven.

Following the “Water Walk” sequence, the narration turns toward contemporary equivalents. Cage reflects on phenomena like Norway’s Slow TV, where long-form unedited recordings of train journeys or knitting marathons are broadcast for hours. These moments allow Cage to draw a philosophical lineage, suggesting that such events, though disconnected in origin, carry his spirit of openness, presence, and duration.

But the prologue is more than homage; it sets up the film’s central irony. We celebrate slowness in art when it’s stylised, but resist it when it appears in life, particularly in bodies that move or think “differently.” With this, the narration moves from Cage’s world to the real one: one where slowness is not aesthetic, but lived. This shift sets up the political thread that will run through the next chapters.

The chapter ends with a turn inward, Cage expressing curiosity about people who “don’t even try” but are already producing these performances simply by existing in ways that don’t fit dominant expectations. This is where we meet the first subjects of the film, not as case studies, but as co-performers.

5.2 Chapter One: Abled

This chapter juxtaposes aesthetic slowness with lived slowness. It introduces three individuals: Cécile, Phillip, and Rita, whose lives challenge assumptions about ability, pace, and participation. Framed again through Cage’s narration, the tone is not sympathetic but admiring, and often playfully ironic. The intention is to displace the lens of disability as deficit, and reframe these lives as embodiments of temporal richness.

Cécile Lecomte, a French-born environmental activist, appears first. Her life is a choreography of contradiction. A wheelchair user, she is also a climber, a teacher, and a tireless activist. The film shows her navigating inaccessible train systems, skating freely, and conducting workshops in para-climbing. Cage’s voice does not pity her, nor overly celebrate her, it observes her. The pacing is slow, and the shots linger. Her presence rewrites the notion of slowness from burden to mode.

Phillip is introduced next. A friend from Leipzig and someone I’ve previously collaborated with in my ethnographic work, Phillip, lives with a motor disability. The film captures him on an ordinary day, with his caregiver Tizian, learning to walk again, and engaging in simple physical activities (balloon ping-pong). Cage’s narration reflects on this contrast between the pace of the body and the pace of the mind, between what society sees as “slowness” and the speed of Phillip’s curiosities. 

Then comes Rita Mazza. A deaf artist and dancer, Rita’s performance unfolds not in sound, but in movement and visuality. The film lets her speak in German Sign Language, uninterrupted, subtitled only for accessibility. Her work collapses the boundaries of theatre, protest, and poetry. Cage, in the narration, admits that he doesn’t speak her language and passes the voice to her, a moment that disrupts the singular authority of narration and makes room for multiplicity.

5.3 Chapter Two: Organ² / ASLSP

This chapter shifts from lived experience to an experimental site of slowness, the ASLSP performance in Halberstadt. It opens with archival footage and transitions into original video from the chord change ceremony. Cage’s narration contextualises the work, how the piece had no tempo markings, how the organ version is meant to stretch time as an act of perception, and how the Halberstadt project now commits to this idea across 639 years.

Prof. Dr. Rainer O. Neugebauer features prominently in this section. Filmed both at his home and inside the Burchardi Church, his interviews provide philosophical depth and historical context. He explains the project’s origin, the mathematics behind the timeline, and how each note is a community decision. The conversations reveal how Cage’s ideas became not just music but a shared practice of temporal responsibility.

The section doesn’t just document, it experiments. Chord shifts are slowed down, the sounds bleed into ambient noise, visitor chatter, and church acoustics. These layers blur composition and environment. Cage’s voice muses about how unpredictable this project is, how it aligns with his belief in chance operations. His humour returns here, he jokes about the ceremony, about his own legacy, and about the still photo of him used since the beginning (Note: this segment from the narration didn’t make it to the final edit of the film).

Importantly, this chapter reflects on slowness not as a theme but method. It reveals how artistic vision can become infrastructure, and how Cage’s abstract score became an intergenerational task. This mirrors the thesis’s central question: What does it mean to slow down in a world that resists it?

5.4 Chapter Three: Forbidden

This chapter returns to my personal narrative/experiences. It begins with a retelling of a two-week Vipassana meditation retreat in Bavaria, a place of silence, stillness, and strict rules. Through Cage’s narration, we learn that talking, eye contact, eating after noon, running, or using any digital device was prohibited. Yet, a rule was broken: an analogue camera was smuggled in.

The images that follow, black and white, grainy, quiet, are not arranged chronologically. They are curated like musical notes, each one a pause. They offer glimpses of dormitories, paths, bowls, light shafts, ordinary things, seen with exaggerated attention. Over this, Cage introduces his final composition: a blend of his works Fontana Mix and Aria, overlaid with these ‘forbidden’ pictures.

This montage is not a climax but a release. The performance is not just about Cage; it becomes participatory. His final lines remind the audience: any sound you make, or don’t make, is part of the piece. In this sense, the viewer becomes implicated, drawn in as a performer.

The chapter challenges the notion of authorship. Who is performing? Cage? The filmmaker? The camera? The rules that were broken? The viewer? All at once, and not necessarily in harmony. This final chapter completes the arc, from Cage’s world, to the world of the disabled, to a world of ongoing collaboration. It closes not with an explanation but with an invitation.