Radio Sorcery: a resonance-based approach to the study of contemporary paranormal practices
The talk introduces a sound and resonance-based approach to the study of contemporary paranormal experiences, focusing on the relational, affective, and performative processes that have shaped occultural practices in recent decades. Radio technology is central to this exploration, considered both materially and discursively. On one side, it traces the use of radio devices among practitioners from the early 1950s – beginning with Friedrich Jürgenson’s experiments on Electronic Voice Phenomena – to the present, including the so-called ‘Estes method’ popularised by the documentary webseries Hellier (2019). On the other, the talk examines radio as a metaphor often used to interpret unexplained experiences, engaging with ideas such as Stone Tape Theory, T.C. Lethbridge’s residual haunting, and John Keel’s superspectrum. These and other frameworks conceptualise the paranormal experience itself as a process akin to radio transmission, made of the tuning-in, decoding, and amplification of otherworldly agencies.
However, the talk does not merely offer a history of paranormal uses of radio. Instead, it proposes an alternative epistemological framework grounded in sound and resonance, capable of foregrounding aspects often overlooked by ocular-centric models. Thinking through sound and resonance – as fundamentally interactive and embodied media – in fact, enables to challenge the often reductionist academic position to the field, redefining the paranormal not as a fixed object of investigation – to be analysed either as an ontological impossibility or as a subjective product of irrationality – but instead as a process emerging from relationalities in-between the embodied and the representational, the experiential and the fictional, the everyday and the exceptional.
Speaker Bio:
Dr Matteo Polato is a researcher, musician and experimental game developer. He is currently Lecturer in Digital Media and Communication at the School of English, Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2025 he completed a PhD on the roles of sound and resonance-based processes in contemporary occulture and paranormal practices. He co-founded D∀RK – Dark Arts Research Kollective at MMU, a research group which explores the creative, communal and boundary-breaking potential of occulture. In the last 20 years he released albums on multiple labels, presented sound art pieces and performed in Europe, UK, USA and Japan. With the collaborative project Yami Kurae he develops experimental videogames inspired by psychogeography and occultural practices.
Hosted & Curated By:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
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