SYNOPSIS
- Artist: Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng
- Medium: Performance, video and sculpture, digital, 1 projection, color, and sound (stereo)
- Genre: Experimental Comedy
- Dimensions: 16:9
- Duration: 60 min
- Budget: $20,000
Ravage is a film and performance artwork featuring 30 customer service calls as a comedy of manners. In this show you will see the art of the phone call, loneliness, commutes to work, and suburbia. Ravage is a performance artwork of experimental jokes.
Recently awarded Best New Media at LA Underground Film Festival.
LOGLINE
We're all just admins of thought! Amid a small-town war, a mediocre call center contractor gets a suitcase for her fatuous small talk. The illogic of call scripts, customers, and petty workplace misconduct show us the grandeur of middle-ware.
FILM SUMMARY
Comedy of manners performance video art of suburban discards who find themselves in mental disarray because the phone rings. In the face of a possible small-town war, a telecom company hires Mo and Gouche to run their call centers. She meets a valued customer in person; they both end up "on hold" for an afternoon while they wait for the other to respond. It seems like everyone is actually journaling in the back of their minds.
While you wait to hear if they'll pay your claim, there is almost nothing like the silent buzz at the other end of the line. Or when you ask a question and the world says back, "no worries". There's an art to miscommunication, unthinking, the void, and the customer service call. Phoning it in might just be a necessary part of life.
This rough-edged sketch, not fully a performance art video nor film, mixing recontextualized unrelated footage and performance is a study of American doofiness and unthinking set in place by the corporate call script dessicant flourishing in our minds. Despite people’s inability to recognize bullshit and parallel existence even in close proximity, the world basically holds itself up and even contractors find the freedom to live beyond what is given--to make the in-between sublime, like only their logic or illogic can do. They are great at living! Depression and joy can be directly attributed to the darkness and play of customer service calls.
ARTIST BIOS
Director, Writer, Performer:Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng (ngai) does experimental joke art, created the pop-up restaurant as performance art in 2007 and a new model of organizing behind the largest online protest in history, and has poems published in Oversound.
Sound Design, Writer: Shea Mowat is an experimental musician and visual artist. Being an an integral part of the Maine noise scene in the early 2000’s, Shea developed a sound and visual art practice that uses both recycled materials and a lot of humor. Shea is on Mang Disc, RRR, and Mystra labels.
Performer Actor: Maisie Sibbison-Alves is an artist, wealth inequality activist, and Shiatsu massage practitioner from Western Massachusetts.
Performer Actor: Donald Warner Shaw III
Performer Actor: Dan Greenwood
Performer Actor: Crystal Regan lives in a bird feeder in Florence, MA. She plays handball and her favorite element is water; tree: beech. When she was a child and a train would go by, everyone would yell “feet off the ground”, and do just that.
Sound Mixing: Eli Winograd lives in Kingston NY and is honored to have contributed to this singular piece of art. He actually thinks about the film kind of a lot! He also individually inspected almost 10,000 audio clips while working on the sound mix.
STILLS
