BATSHIT TIMES is an annual print and online magazine that features artists, activists, and scientists challenging contemporary society’s geopolitical, technocratic, hypersurveilled, megacybernetwork nightmare.

If you’re entertained by the anxiety of our times, this magazine is for you.

The idea of publishing a magazine was ruminating in my mind for years, primarily one featuring art hard to find elsewhere. I’m naturally drawn to weirdos and freaks, and I like to tell them all about each other's work. When I find something I like, I text it to fifty people, and they all respond with, “You sent this to fifty people, didn’t you?” Since I was already holding these conversations in person, why not curate their ideas together into a body of work?

I needed a physical object where I could interview the blasphemous, sacrilegious, and the profane in a way that felt documentary, like I was capturing and archiving a zeitgeist.

I remember attending a comedy show in Austin, Texas in 2015 in which one comedian made the comment, “Can you guys believe it? We’re living through two thousand fifteen?” It was one of those moments when an entire audience collectively sits up straight and thinks, “Ah, wow. 2015. How cool! We are living in the best of times!” And it was true. Everyone on the planet had a glorious 2015 because the future looked bright — no pandemics, no metaverse, no Neo-Nazis, smaller Amazon, Bernie for President.

But everything changed in 2016. The world got real manic and depressing all at once. Worldviews were shattered and empirical truths came toppling down. With every year, reality became less recognizable and more incongruous, and by the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the New Abnormal took hold.

Yet as things fall apart, I can’t shake the feeling that I… enjoy… all of it — The Feed, trending topics, news cycles, clickbait, rising tensions, heightened temperatures, global unease. We’re living through the fall of Rome, yet I feel like I’m in attendance at the best bacchanal in human history. There’s humility in living through and experiencing such an unprecedented epoch. With each new push notification or rumor of some cosmic shift in sensibility, I can’t help reveling in the comfort that I WAS HERE. 

As artists and thinkers, how do we grapple with this sudden shift in reality? How do we refrain from telling stories that become outdated tomorrow? How are culture and consensus constructed in ways that eventually break down and fall apart? What are we doing to feel something in this state of heightened anxiety? How do we build a better world from the ruins?

With all of these thoughts rushing through my head, I decided to take action. At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, in a world that abdicated IRL life for one of screens, I texted those fifty people and told them I was finally launching my magazine, BATSHIT TIMES, both a tongue-in-cheek reference to coronavirus bats and a riff on the New York Times (Democracy dies in darkness? We call it home).

Since then, we’ve printed two 160-page issues of the magazine, the first of which, aptly named Quarantine, is also available to download for free, and we are currently compiling a third, much beefier issue for 2022. We publish visual projects, essays, and interviews that hold equal parts disdain and curiosity for the chaos, dissimilation, and fragmentation of our times. The magazine condenses all of our shared feelings and anxieties about contemporary news cycles into art that inspires. Want to read about a sculptor who creates bioplastics with hagfish slime? Or a street artist who turns $1 bills into art objects? How about music made with vibrators? And if you value the digital as much as the physical, why not head to our website to screen some video art?

In 2021, as various virtual communities and very-online thinkers took control of my brain activity, I turned my attention to the Wild West of magazinery — Instagram. The BATSHIT Instagram account is a gnarly combobulation of moodboards, memepage, shitposts, tweets, art I like, art I hate, real news stories, and fake news headlines. The account is a tool for spreading the twin Gospels of bafflement and bemusement, a way to indoctrinate poor souls on the Internet into finding pure, utter glee amongst the chaos. You arrive at BATSHIT a Doomer, but you leave with mad respect for this Golden Age.

Something that feels very post-2015 and emblematic of BATSHIT is the collective endorphin rush of laughing at the news. I get a kick out of the news, regardless of subject matter, because everything that happens these days is fucking insane. And I don’t mean the “Here’s your daily brief on what is happening” NPR morning news. I mean the “What the fuck did I just read?” nighttime news. Legacy media and traditional news outlets are only valuable in reminding me what I already know: Biden can’t accomplish anything, Republicans will sweep the midterms, and liberals haven’t caught on that they memed January 6th into spectacle. The news you can sink your teeth into requires curating news app notifications to your outlandish tastes, a way of manipulating the algorithm to only reveal things that in 2015 would have made you think, “Wow, in 2021, I am going to be living through the BEST of times.” 

The tickle one feels when reading these news articles is due in part to the collective awareness that such headlines were impossible to imagine only a few years ago, when we were still living in Happy Rainbow Sunshine Times. Now, outrageous news stories like these appear so commonplace that we feel like we’re privy to some inside-joke, like we’re scrying into a double-sided mirror that simultaneously screams, “I am going insane!” and “This makes things feel normal!” Every hour, in some new horrific shape or form, we are reminded of the rapid acceleration of society, technology, climate change, and culture.

“Development” as an idea has lost its meaning because worldviews fluctuate every few hours. The constant desensitization to rapid societal change swaddles us tight into a lore zone of shared knowledge, nostalgia, and semiotics, where the zeitgeist plays out like a gameshow and a questline. The next time you find yourself scrolling through Tik Tok, are.na, or Twitter late at night, try reading the news instead. Your brain will be so desperate at this late hour for a dopamine rush that the tiniest little headline on oil rigging or Marjorie Taylor Greene will set off a firecracker explosion of neural stimulation.

As my follower demographic on the Instagram account expands from mutual friends to strangers, I notice that engagement spikes occur when I post screenshots of news headlines. I can signal to my followers, “Hey, thanks to climate change, sperm is declining and penises are shrinking.” You wouldn’t believe the conversations sparked by posting news headlines; friends, foes, and strangers all want to tell me what they think. I send them my news, they send me theirs. Pic for pic. Suddenly I find myself posting and sharing what they bring to my attention, which initiates a supply chain system of sending and receiving free news. Some days I don’t even need to check my News app because a random teenager in Warsaw or Tokyo will deliver the juiciest articles to my inbox.

The real fun begins when I toss in what my favorite professor would call intermedial metalepsis — false news headlines Photoshopped to appear real. Some followers get the joke, and some believe them seriously. I finally understand the thrill experienced by shady fake news writers in Russia or Macedonia. Stretching the truth signals an appreciation for the irony upon which our world functions, while inviting followers to think more critically about how our sophisticated media environment informs our thinking and rationalization. And overall, it’s a gesture of admiration for being alive during the best time to be human.

Hence, the BATSHIT Instagram account functions as an archivist project for sharing and promoting news articles that inspire and influence the editorial decisions of the magazine. It’s a news bulletin that familiarizes a specific community with an attitude about the world. This in turn builds a framework for thinking about art and society, so that contributors to the magazine understand the type of projects and ideas we publish. BATSHIT has no need to release a prompt or set of guidelines for submissions because contributors who follow the Instagram account just get it. They not only enjoy being reminded of the absurdity of our times, but they also prefer working in and exploring that headspace. The digital platform and physical object reinforce one another, holding conversation across time and space, connecting people born for the end of days.