Transfer Protocol (Transferprotokoll) – A Neurodivergent (Autistic) FEATURE FILM by Timothy Speed

Transferprotokoll (2024) is a feature-length artistic research film that investigates poverty, labour, state administration, and the valuation of human contribution in contemporary Germany. Developed under no-budget conditions and grounded in long-term empirical research, the film combines fictional narrative, documentary elements, satire, and autobiographical embodiment. Rather than representing poverty from an external observational standpoint, the work operates through direct intervention, positioning the author’s own lived experience within administrative, legal, and media systems as a research method.

This Zenodo record archives the film together with a collection of institutional responses, including editorial assessments, rejection letters, and formal correspondence from publicly funded broadcasting institutions (ARD, ZDF, SWR, NDR, rbb). These materials are not treated as secondary documentation but as integral research data. They document how cultural institutions articulate relevance, legitimacy, and public suitability when confronted with a work that exceeds established aesthetic, editorial, and epistemic frameworks.

Within the logic of artistic research, the institutional reactions constitute an extension of the film’s investigative field. They make visible structural selection mechanisms, boundary-drawing practices, and forms of epistemic exclusion that shape whose experiences, voices, and forms of knowledge are permitted visibility within publicly mandated media systems. The archive thus captures not only a cultural artefact, but a measurable interaction between artistic intervention and institutional power.

Situated within the author’s broader body of work on poverty, labour, neurodivergent cognition, and emergent value systems, Transferprotokoll functions as a cross-medium research node connecting film, empirical inquiry, political intervention, and theoretical development. The combined archive enables longitudinal analysis of cultural governance, representational violence, and the limits of institutionalized diversity in democratic societies.

Autistic Dramaturgy

Autistic Dramaturgy names a mode of cinematic structuring that does not emerge from narrative convention, psychological character arcs, or audience management, but from an autistic epistemic relation to time, perception, and world-stabilisation. It is not a stylistic choice layered onto film, but the direct formal consequence of a neurodivergent cognitive organisation.

Classical dramaturgy—whether Aristotelian, Hollywood-based, or its art-house variants—presupposes teleology: development, escalation, resolution. It assumes a spectator who requires orientation, identification, emotional cueing, and catharsis. Autistic dramaturgy rejects these premises. It is non-teleological, non-redemptive, and structurally open, because autistic cognition does not primarily organise reality through narrative progression, but through persistence, recursion, simultaneity, and structural pressure.

In autistic dramaturgy, time is not a linear vector but a pressure field. Events are not ordered by causal hierarchy but by relevance density. Repetition is not redundancy; it is structural insistence. Cuts are not transitions toward resolution, but marks of unresolved reality. Montage functions associatively rather than hierarchically, producing friction instead of flow. What neurotypical cinema would diagnose as “too much,” “too long,” or “unclear” is, from an autistic perspective, the refusal to compress complexity into consumable form.

This dramaturgy is incompatible with the heroic arc. The autistic protagonist is not a vehicle of identification but an epistemic disturbance. They are not positioned to be redeemed, overcome, or transformed. Instead, they persist. The narrative does not move through the character toward resolution; it moves around the character, exposing systemic structures that remain unchanged. Justice is not resolved but displaced back onto the audience as an unresolved question.

Autistic dramaturgy therefore produces discomfort—not as provocation, but as method. It refuses empathy scripting, emotional instruction, and moral closure. Affect oscillates between flatness, grotesque exaggeration, and abrupt seriousness, without offering relief. This is not emotional absence, but resistance to emotional management. The spectator is not guided, protected, or reassured. They are implicated.

From an Artistic Research perspective, autistic dramaturgy is epistemic. Editing becomes a form of thinking. Montage operates as a cognitive trace. The cut is not a narrative tool but an operator: it marks the boundary where reality resists integration. The film does not represent knowledge; it enacts it. Meaning is not transmitted but generated through exposure to structural inconsistency.

Crucially, autistic dramaturgy must not be misread as “experimental” in the aesthetic sense, nor as a deviation from competence. It is a coherent, internally stable cinematic logic that directly contradicts neurotypical norms of clarity, pacing, and audience service. Its political force lies precisely in this refusal. By denying the viewer the comfort of resolution, it mirrors the lived condition of those whose lives are structurally unresolved by society.

Autistic dramaturgy is therefore not a genre, but a counter-grammar. It challenges the dominance of neurotypical narrative standards in cinema, research, and public discourse. It asserts that complexity, persistence, and unresolved structure are not failures of form, but necessary conditions for truth in a world that systematically erases non-normative modes of existence.

In this sense, autistic dramaturgy is not merely about autism. It is a demand: that cinema, like society, expand its epistemic capacity—or remain fundamentally incapable of representing reality beyond its own comfort zones.