Peter McCain is the creative director and editor-in-chief of BATSHIT TIMES, a New York-based contemporary arts magazine that launched during the pandemic in 2020 and has been documenting how artists are building a better world in the face of ecological and political collapse ever since. The name refers both to the rumoured origins of Covid and to the general state of everything else — and the magazine treats that state not with despair but with the fierce creative energy of people who refuse to look away.
Each issue runs to 300 pages, printed in offset at 170×240mm in a limited edition of 500 copies. The first volume, Quarantine, explored the hollow interiority and introspective anxieties produced by an end-stage capitalist society thrust into a global pandemic. The second, Melting Point, saw artists and scientists combining expertise to envision a post-quarantine, post-Trump, post-capital future. The third, Fall of Rome, featured 50 artists working in photography, fashion, design, and AI — with a cover created by Joel Fear using Midjourney, making it one of the earliest print magazines to feature AI-generated cover art. Contributors across the run include Benjamin Bratton, creative director Ben Ditto, Holyrad Studio’s Daryl Oh, algorave musician DJ\_Dave, and dozens of emerging experimental artists.
The magazine is resolutely ugly in the conventional sense — magCulture described it as a 300-page analogue Instagram feed — revelling in found images, manipulated images, and the daily chaos of 21st-century life. But the operation behind it is quietly principled: 10% of every purchase goes to the Climate Justice Alliance, another 10% to the Indigenous Environmental Network, and the team partners with Mossy Earth to plant 50 trees per year across Europe, offsetting an estimated 12 tons of CO2 annually. As McCain told the Stack Magazines podcast: things are going to be weird for the rest of our lives. BATSHIT TIMES is the magazine that decided to document the weirdness rather than pretend it isn’t happening.
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