Weird Studies
SpectreVision Radio
Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel host a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality."
SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring the anomalous, the luminous, and the numinous. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.
spectrevisionradio.com
linktr.ee/spectrevision
SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring the anomalous, the luminous, and the numinous. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions.
spectrevisionradio.com
linktr.ee/spectrevision
Episodes
Mentioned books
12 snips
Nov 4, 2026 • 1h 22min
Episode 222 – Art is Totally Objective: On Formalism
What makes art meaningful: its subject matter, or the patterns and relationships within the work itself? This discussion explores formalism through Stravinsky, Liszt, Dave Hickey, and Deleuze, moving from musical tension and Chinese opera to art bureaucracy, cultural elitism, and the mysterious encounter that resists interpretation.
23 snips
Oct 21, 2026 • 1h 21min
Episode 221 – On 'The Exorcist'
Phil Ford and J.F. Martel delve into The Exorcist as a landmark of American Catholic horror. They explore demons as literal, predatory forces; Pazuzu and transactional religion; and the film’s unnerving collision of medicine, technology, and supernatural dread. The conversation widens into vastation, nihilism, extinction, Dostoevsky, and horror’s power to expose the fragile stakes of meaning and morality.
24 snips
Oct 7, 2026 • 1h 55min
Episode 220: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man: Live at the Dream Mapping Symposium
A live reading and discussion of Dostoevsky’s “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” explores nihilism, suicide, paradise, corruption, and redemption. The conversation travels through dream journeys, near-death experiences, the imaginal world, Chuang Tzu, Bergson, and the strange boundary between waking reality and vision. Along the way, dreams emerge as catalysts for moral transformation and radical questions about love, meaning, and reality.
36 snips
Sep 23, 2026 • 1h 25min
Episode 219 – Composing the Cosmos, with Meredith Rigby
Meredith Rigby, a musicologist, educator, and writer, explores how 20th-century composers turned outer space into a realm of myth and mystery. They discuss recurring musical tropes of ascent, sirens and wordless cosmic voices, scientific wonder, Messiaen’s incarnational cosmos, Bergson’s enchantment, and how music makes the silent universe perceptible.
31 snips
Sep 9, 2026 • 1h 15min
Episode 218 — A Mighty Matter of Legend: On J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Two Towers'
Phil Ford and J.F. Martel revisit Tolkien’s The Two Towers through the strange power of stories. They explore legends becoming literal, the enchanted nature of ordinary life, Saruman’s hunger for control, and Frodo and Sam’s faith in an unwritten song. Along the way, they consider Gollum’s moral ambiguity, the fading of the Elves, Gimli’s transformation, and Sauron’s threat to mystery itself.
25 snips
Aug 26, 2026 • 45min
Mid-Hiatus Bonus: A Door in the Fourth Wall
Announcements about talks and a new six-week course set the scene. Conversation explores figures who break the fourth wall and how fiction reshapes eyewitness lore. They trace shifting UFO imagery, sleep paralysis as a threshold for strange encounters, and how imagined beings and artworks can take on autonomous reality.
32 snips
Aug 5, 2026 • 1h 18min
Episode 217 – Books, Spirits, and Hysteria, with Asti Hustvedt
Asti Hustvedt, an independent scholar of 19th-century neuroscience, hysteria, and Spiritualism, explores what it means to "get lost" in a book. She links reading to mediumship and thought transference. Conversations touch on hysteria’s shifting meanings, nineteenth-century psychical research, books as haunted spaces, and how texts continue to live and alter in readers’ minds.
41 snips
Jul 22, 2026 • 1h 34min
Episode 216 – Artworks Are People Too
They debate whether some artworks behave like living persons and demand ethical responses. They trace this idea through museum encounters, mythic and religious thinkers, and Indigenous animacy frameworks. They consider literary cases, cognitive theories of cultural causation, and repatriation to explore how personhood might extend beyond humans.
29 snips
Jul 8, 2026 • 41min
Special Episode: Make Art!
They wander Victorian London’s grime and cosmopolitan oddities. They imagine kung-fu bobbies, displaced cowboys, and judo in the streets. They riff on tech and social misalignment as fuel for weird futures and optimistic post-apocalypse roleplaying. They celebrate tabletop play as collective agency and argue for making art as resistance to AI and cultural flattening.
37 snips
Jun 24, 2026 • 1h 29min
Episode 215 – Where No One Can Hear You Scream: On Ridley Scott's 'Alien'
A deep dive into Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror classic and its return to uncanny weirdness. They explore the xenomorph as a force tied to technology, industry, and evolution. The conversation traces mythic continuities, corporate extraction imagery, and Giger’s biomechanical vision. They argue for preserving ambiguity against sequel-driven explanations and revisit how the film stages cosmic meaninglessness.
