BATSHIT TIMES is an online and print magazine showcasing experimental art inspired by the frustrations and anxieties of humanity’s contemporary geopolitical-technocratic landscape. The editor’s goal is to invoke the chaos, the fragmentation, the disassembly, the dissimulation, the absolute-what-the-fuckedness, and the ironic coalescence of our times through visual projects, films, essays, and articles on emerging experimental art forms and science practices.
We donate 10% of your purchase to the Climate Justice Alliance, a grassroots network of over 70 organizations that promote community resilience, economic equity, climate stability, and racial justice. Another 10% of your purchase goes to the Indigenous Environmental Network, which develops policy initiatives and provides grants and resources to Indigenous communities affected by environmental change. Lastly, we’ve partnered with Mossy Earth’s reforestation projects to plant 50 trees across Europe per year, an annual offset of 12 tons of CO2 emissions. For reference, each print edition of BATSHIT TIMES produces about 2 pounds of CO2.
Volume 3: Fall of Rome
Featuring Benjamin Bratton, Ben Ditto, Maya Golyshkina, Anna Koblish, Melissa Santamaría, Noelle Duquette, Thomas Mars, Cole Witter, Ana Roman, Nate Mohler, Andrii Dostliev, Lia Dostlieva, Joel Fear, Midjourney, Brian Oakes, Swordes, Mad Plesasant, Mitchell Allison, Adam Burack, Mel Diosa, RAMBONA, Rafael X, Vivek Sebastian, Faryn Fee, Ileana Ninn, Emmett Palaima, Camden Coxson, Nina Gofur, and more. Cover art by Joel Fear with Midjourney AI.
Spring/Summer 2022. | 300 pages.
Hark! the hour is loudly calling for the people to arise!
Put away your face filters and turn your heads up to the skies!
A weary lightning storm is brewing and the gods all yearn to strike.
Their bolts will fuel conspiracy in the people you dislike.
The permafrost is melting and your latte is erupting and
your Tinder date is asking if you go to see a psych.
Be ye not deceived, the world hath never veiled its look,
until the end of time this shit will surely hath ye shook.
Fear not these words bestowed upon you today:
the war within Rome is forever to stay.
Volume 2: Melting Point
Featuring Holyrad Studio, Beshken, Von, Jade Fabello, Hugo Christian-Slane, Joy Youwakim, SHLVES, Mt. Borracho.
Fall/Winter 2020. | 160 pages.
Volume 2: Melting Point refers to the point-of-no-return for a botched experiment gone wrong, calling to mind images of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor; the ever-impending threat of climate catastrophe; the fire Prometheus steals from Zeus to give to humanity; the working and artist classes spilling into the streets during a summer of protest; and the evaporation of the American melting pot myth amidst a failed pandemic response, increased racial and nationalist prejudice, voter suppression, and economic meltdown.
In light of the global quarantine, how has the artist role-played as scientist, teasing and testing unfamiliar materials and formulating new theories about the phenomenology of art? What happens when the artist as scientist is left to their own demise in their makeshift laboratory, searching for meaning in a world of post-truth and non-reality, for relatability in a hyper-online society with no physical human contact?
What happens when Dr. Jekyll loses themselves in their work, confronting a side they never thought to find? Or when Frankenstein becomes their own monster, misplacing knowledge and rediscovering it as a smoldering ember: a beacon of light in the darkness that is harmful to the touch?
In this issue, artists and scientists combine their expertise to envision a post-quarantine, post-Trump, post-capital, post-post until you die future. What will the new normal look like when these thinkers and experimenters bring the new abnormal to the forefront — visions of machine-readable police brutality, landfill agriculture, dead bee helixes, bathroom performance art, JUUL pod sculptures, hauntological soundscapes, satirical street posters, and orgasms turned into music.
Volume 1: Quarantine
Featuring Sasha Fishman, Lychnis, Seth DeMasi ATX Liquid Lights, Streamcatcher, DJ_Dave, and Madeleine Lyon.
Spring/Summer 2020.
Volume 1: Quarantine explores the hollow interiority and introspective anxieties produced by an end-stage capitalist society thrust into a global pandemic. Contributors probe the possibilities of sustainable artist industries that are independent from traditional frameworks and economies, relying on personal networks for inspiration and the production of meaningful work.
Featured are innovative artists laying the foundation for a cyber-modern future, engaging in DIY biology sculpture, live coding for music, vaporwave and darkwave synth-tech, audiovisual liquid light projection, textile recycling, generative 3D processing, webcam performance, digital Suprematist collaging, and televisual metalepsis, to name a few.
