SYNOPSIS

Beginnin'o'RAVAGE Trailer AVANTGARDOMEDY Versionsios from Tying on Vimeo.

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, the phone call, loneliness, commutes to work, and suburbia. Ravage is a performance artwork of experimental jokes.

Recently awarded New Filmmakers NYC semi- finalist.

LOGLINE

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

In this not-fully-a-performance art video nor film, suburban discards find themselves in mental disarray because the phone rings. Amid a small- town war, a mediocre call center contractor gets a suitcase for her fatuous small talk. She meets a valued customer in person and are both "on hold" for an afternoon because they expect the other to respond. It seems like everyone is actually journaling in the back of their minds.

This rough-edged sketch 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.