FEATURES
Read BATSHIT TIMES' original stories with activists, scientists, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and visual and performance artists.
Into the Mouth of Madness — creative director Ben Ditto: "The chaos is all so fucking great. Nanotechnology drones, genetic engineering, a woman in Myanmar unaware of the military coup taking place behind her as she performs a TikTok exercise, Twitch streams of Capitol riots… It’s an insane meme."
Contingent Futures — Benjamin Bratton's work spans philosophy, architecture, computer science and geopolitics. His latest book, The Revenge of The Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World, sees the COVID-19 pandemic as a crisis of political imagination and capacity in the West and in response argues on behalf of a positive biopolitics.
Cry of the Valkyries — Brian Oakes’ printed circuit board (PCB) sound sculptures emit ambient drone progressions and feedback loops sampled from the environments around them. Anticipating your footsteps and the whispers on your breath, these sculptures mimic the viewer in unexpected delay, generating trance-like soundscapes.
Licking War Wounds — Ukranian artists Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva licked a tank-shaped salt lamp day by day, bit by bit, demonstrating the slow and not necessarily successful re-shaping of the object of trauma.
My Date With A Hagfish — Los Angeles-based sculptor Sasha Fishman finds herself on a quest to replace epoxy resin with naturally-decomposing organic materials. She’s turned her head to nylon-strong fibers found in hagfish slime and a biopolymer found in shellfish called chitosan.
Divine Queerness — Cole Witter is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose passion for performance informs his photographic study of self-portraiture. His themes explore spirituality, duality, the power of self-transformation, and the embrace of divine Queerness.
Faceless Recognition — Ileana Ninn is a photographer working in Paris, where you can find several of her posters, or affiches, wheatpasted around the city. Ninn is interested in the psychology of humans and how the performative nature of identity plays out in public and private spheres.
Blind Legions — Emmett Palaima's practice is conceptually rooted in the idea that technology and magic are one and the same, and that electricity is a manifestation of the divine or elemental forces underlying physical reality. He gives this force worship through the creation of devotional objects and intense, physical electronic experiences inspired by biomimicry, medieval motifs, and the globalized industrial economy.
Hear the Cosmic Giggle — Faryn Fee is a Los Angeles-based visual artist whose video self portraiture and delicate, elfin-faced sculptures fuse earthly themes, ancient myth, and otherworldly characteristics. Her work explores the infinite possibilities presented by the universe — and the universe within ourselves.
Sweet Smut — Noelle Duquette turns the softcore photography genre on its head, portraying the charm of twenties womanhood as jocular and madcap, while simultaneously rejecting the notion of the all-American girl as elegant or predictable.
Imagining the Artist Laboratory — Holyrad Studio offers space for artists to become problem-solvers for real-world solutions, exploring and investigating issues like identity, race, gender, environmental justice, and more. In practice, the studio acts as a laboratory space for artists to behave as scientists, prodding at the questions and meanings of life. Founder and photographer Daryl Oh considers her role in building a future that preserves and strengthens artist communities from the inside-out.
Teamwork Makes the Streamwork — Vaporwave musician StreamCatcher sees remix culture as a way to recontextualize the present by drawing from the past. His two recent albums are anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, and all-around anarchist, critiquing digital and mainstream media’s influence over our buying habits and art-consumption.
Algorave: As Cyberpunk As It Gets — NYC-based cyberpunk algorave musician DJ_Dave uses Sonic Pi to code algorithms to create live music without any instruments.
Just One Dollar — Hugo Christian-Slane is a multi-award winning designer and conceptual artist from New Zealand currently living in New York. His latest series, Just One Dollar, explores the value of currency and commerce and challenges Western spending habits and ideals.
Content Aware Fool — Adam Burack is curious about people who society forgets. He understands that their ideas and stories are some of the best life has to offer. He approaches photography with this in mind, erasing and reinterpreting the contours and colors of people’s faces to find what their hearts have to say.
Instagram Is Going Mad — Maya Golyshkina's work familiarizes the domestic anxiety of pandemic lockdown restrictions and state-control of the public sphere by confronting the social attention granted to common household objects. In a world of screens, Golyshkina asks us to reflect on the quotidian beauty of cracked eggs, cheese graters, armchairs, and your grandmother’s bowl of sweets.
Mad Scientist: Art in the Age of Viruses, Sadboys, Fuckboys, and Cybersex — Von is a self-produced artist, songwriter, performer, creative director, and engineer based in NYC. Using technology from Lioness, Von makes music with her own orgasm wave patterns. Von is the CEO/founder of Vondom Labs.
I am not trying to explain myself, but I totally am: Jade Fabello — “Not long ago, I published my first big story. It was a piece disavowing my ties to white liberalism and the social elite of Austin. I like to think that I didn’t write that story to appeal to white liberals. I certainly didn’t write it for the political elite I was disavowing. But I always try to be aware of when I might be catering to whiteness by explaining the basics of Black humanity.”
I Still Love Plants — The Texas Rio Grande Valley is responsible for the highest production of fruits, vegetables, and grains in Texas yet is also home to four of the most impoverished counties in the United States. Joy Youwakim is working to increase economic autonomy for farmers and consumers in this region.
Plant and Human Pain — Nika Sandler's photography bears witness to the unconventional beauty of both plant and human pain, decay, and death. They compare the external manifestations of plant illness and death with the bodily suffering of dying people, finding common ground between the tragic sides of plant and human existence.
Neu Brushstrokes — Nate Mohler is a conceptual and avant-garde digital media artist working with projection mapping, immersive installation, sculpture and video art. He’s currently thinking about painted cities, installation entropy, media archaeology, and the rise and fall of old systems and new markets.
Three Reasons to Go to Church — For four days in June 2022, a Protestant church in Amsterdam, de Thomas, hosted a braiding of deep time reflections. Referred to by the artists as a “temporary seizure”, it felt more like a temporal one; a crack in the continual flux of knowledge and being. “interface trilogy: glossolalia” didn’t blind with false enlightenment, but rather saw the collaborative art practice iida-ssi illuminate the importance of physical space for thought, especially ones without prescribed answers.
The Insides of Spaces — Using TouchDesigner, Melissa Santamaría coalesces her ideas, colors, and textures into abstract, visceral examinations of her own emotional state.
Prototype — Ana Roman is an audiovisual AI artist, music producer, and creative technologist. Her latest endeavor is Skulptor, a solo-electronic-frequency project inspired by biomimicry, mycological cybernetics, and insect behavior.
Shitting Out Pure Celestial Energy — Vivek Sebastian is not only interested in how particular narratives are representations of our shared subconscious, but also how the recordings of those interpretations, which were never perfect or objectively whole, manifest physically and mentally in perpetual reinterpretations.
Give Me That Camera! — Anna Koblish is a Brooklyn-based photographer distinguishable for her fish-eye lens fashion editorials that twist, contort, and distort the body. A lifetime of looking at images means she now wants to find new ways of representing the human body in relation to space, light, and color.
I Guess Lychnis Is My Witch Name. "I use it to express my vast powers and explore my various dimensions of hell." — Describing their process of making music as spellcraft, Lychnis has recently turned to smartphone video apps to visualize their dreams as reality.
Psychedelic Projector Art — Combining oil, water, candle dye, Magic lantern slides, transparencies, and an old overhead projector, Seth DeMasi (ATX Liquid Lights) performs psychedelic liquid light shows at concerts, house parties, and events around Austin and central Texas.
Sequoia Lyon — Madeleine Lyon explores sustainable and renewable textile production and consumption by pairing fabric designs with sequoia trees. Interview by Josie Strick
The Past is Present — Brooklyn-based electronic musician, Beshken, discusses hauntology in music; modular synths; his personal relationship to psyche, consciousness, and memory; the future of New York DIY live music events; and his party collective, 29 Speedway.
SHLVES: On Display — SHLVES is an anonymous collective of BIPOC disc jockeys who specialize in immersive audiovisual experiences for fashion runway shows. As the pandemic forced performing artists into their homes, SHLVES envisioned a future where musicians like themselves could rise from the ashes.
Subterranea & Geothoughtmaps — Mt. Borracho is a San Antonio-based underground audio-visual Techno project founded in 2013 by Cameron Day and Zachary Smith. The duo approaches each album as an installation for galleries rather than traditional listening. Using electro-acoustic hardware, they invoke dark drone sounds, personal surrealism, and the paranormal in their live DJ sets.