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The Subverse

The Subverse

Auteur(s): Dark N Light
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 The Subverse, presented by Dark ‘n’ Light is a podcast that uncovers the hidden and marginal in stories about nature, culture and social justice. From the cosmic to the quantum, from cells to cities and from colonial histories to reimagining futures. Join Susan Mathews every fortnight on a Thursday for weird and wonderful conversations, narrated essays and poems that dwell on the evolving contingencies of life.All Rights Reserved Art Sciences sociales
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  • Defying Gravity: Bird flight, culture and evolutionary grooves

    Defying Gravity: Bird flight, culture and evolutionary grooves
    Oct 22 2025
    In the final episode of the season, Susan Mathews speaks with Antone Martinho-Truswell, a fascinating behavioural ecologist, Operations Manager at the Sydney Policy Lab, and Research Associate at the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. His Substack is called The Village Green and he is author of The Parrot in the Mirror: How evolving to be like birds made us human (2022). The book, and this episode, considers the parallels between the ‘evolutionary grooves’ of the extremely advantageous traits of humans and birds—the former, by becoming the cultural ape, and the latter through flight. Antone explains how one trait that is advantageous leads to a number of adaptations that support it. For example, how human babies are born underdeveloped, and humans have cultures that care for children for a long time in order to support the big brain that we need to grow. Taking us through the evolution of birds, Antone describes how, in dinosaurs like T-Rex, small raptors and Archaeopteryx, scales evolved into feathers which smaller dinosaurs probably began to take advantage of with glides and long leaps. And, over time, the bodies of these creatures became entirely specialised for flight. They spoke about relative lifespans. Birds live two to ten times as long as mammals of a similar size. The reason is flight. The most obvious advantage is that it’s much easier to escape predators, but birds live longer even when there are no predators around. This is because of K-selection and r-selection. K-selection is a live-slow-die-old strategy, and r-selection a live-fast-die-young strategy. An adaptation like flight starts a virtuous cycle where, since it is much more likely that a bird makes it to the next breeding season, evolution selects traits that enable it to live longer. Movement itself, Antone stresses, is a pretty impressive biological feat. While microorganisms and water-dwelling creatures like coral are bathed in the medium that sustains its life, and plants are rooted in a life-sustaining substrate, wrapping all of the incredibly complex chemical reactions of life in a waterproof bag like a dog or a human is incredible. And then adding the third dimension of flight is a difficult feat because the animal has to fight gravity itself. The evolutionary advantage is huge because it's rare, and it’s rare because it's hard to do. But such a drastic advantage can also have other implications. Antone’s article Empire of Flight in Aeon, considers why, even though birds have a lot of the same raw materials for a robust and complex culture—intelligence, communication, long overlapping lives, knowledge passed down through the generations—they have not developed one. Evolution never aspires to anything, only responds to inadequacy, and so, he hypotheses, birds don’t need culture because flight is such a powerful adaptation. The more advantageous the adaptation, the less likely it is that a different way of life evolves. Similarly, in humans, while there are some incremental changes to our genes, our complex culture, with its welfare, science, and other innovations, has taken away the pressure to do things differently. Even if there is an apocalyptic event that takes away all of our technology, we're still going to have all of the abstract components—like writing and money—that give us significant advantages. But just as this capacity lets us build concepts like democracy, it also enables us to build complex concepts like ‘enemies’ and ‘hate’ in ways that few other creatures can. Finally, while narrow sustainability—energy consumption, resource use—is important, Antone persuades us to think of broader sustainability. We need to consider the physical space and the resources that we and our cities use, and, rather than fencing in nature, find ways to live that are continuous with the rest of nature. This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance. More about the guest: Antone Martinho-Truswell’s work focuses on animal minds and learning, and on human behaviour and interaction with the natural world. He is particularly interested in birds and cephalopods, intelligent species whose evolutionary history differs dramatically from that of mammals. His academic work has been published in Science, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Current Biology and Animal Behaviour and covered in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Times and New Scientist, among others. He also writes on longstanding questions in biology and animal behaviour for Aeon and the BBC. You can find him on Instagram @stjosephwoodworks.
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    53 min
  • Floating on an Ocean of Air: Exploring the intersections of art, activism and science

    Floating on an Ocean of Air: Exploring the intersections of art, activism and science
    Oct 15 2025
    In episode four of The Subverse, host Susan Mathews talks with Joaquin Ezcurra, an intrepid and adventurous cartographer, marine technician and web developer. Since 2017, Joaquin has been actively involved in Aerocene, an open-source, experimental practice and movement for eco-social justice founded by artist Tomás Saraceno and carried forward by a growing global community since 2015. Aerocene uses art, site-specific installations and augmented reality sculptures to promote climate change awareness. Joaquin has been involved in its aero-solar flight operations, digital strategies, website development, app development, communications, acts as a community liaison, and documents the movement through thousands of images and videos. Air and the atmosphere, Joaquin reminds us, are the ultimate commons. As Evangelista Torricelli, the inventor of the barometer, famously said, we live at the bottom of an ocean of air. But today, the air is highly controlled, for political, military and commercial reasons. Aerocene imagines a utopia, allowing us to dream of a world in which we may take more time and a more winding route to reach our destination; and our destinations themselves may change. Over the last decade, Aerocene has had projects on six continents, 37 countries and 158 locations, and a total 218 flights. It has evolved from an art and science project to an art and activism project. Joaquin emphasised however, that the story of the movement is not only one of triumphs but failures and learning. The need for safety came into focus early when, while piloting an experimental flight, Tomás Saraceno fell from a significant height, sustaining injuries that required surgery. Since then, the Aerocene community has embraced the highest aeronautical safety protocols and only involves professional balloon pilots for aerosolar free-flights. A milestone for the Aerocene movement was the 2020 flight of the Aerocene Pacha. A team comprised of Argentine and foreign pilots, the indigenous communities of the Salinas Grandes fighting for their rights, and BTS fans, in the middle of the salt flats of Argentina were witness to a flight that broke 32 FAI world records for altitude and distance. The flight was piloted by Leticia Marqués, a kindergarten teacher turned professional balloon pilot. It was livestreamed around the world, carrying a message chosen by the local First Nation communities: ‘water and life are worth more than lithium’. It was, as Joaquin describes, a sight never seen; a compelling intersection of science, art, activism and music communities coming together. We then discussed the issues with the ‘green transition’, which is a shift to electric vehicles in Europe and other countries in the guise of environmental concerns. However, the mining of lithium, which is fuelling this shift, is destructive, and needs extractive infrastructure so vast that one can only comprehend it from a plane or a satellite. It is destroying the salt flats of Argentina, a crucial wetland that serves as a migratory hub for birds in the Americas. In 2023, the Aerocene community gathered in Alfarcito, Argentina, where some of the country’s top environmentalist, sociologist lawyers, philosophers, artists, writers and poets issued a declaration based on the idea of the rights of nature for the Salinas Grandes in Alfarcito. This hasn’t stopped mining companies, but these efforts have stood along these communities and slowed the advance of mining in this region. Geopolitics has long been rooted in land ownership, projected upward into the air, and down into the earth. But the atmosphere is more than a void above the land. Recognizing the rights of air means acknowledging its agency in sustaining life. We need to move away from this colonial capitalist view and increase the connections in our lives. Aerocene’s Museo Aero Solar, a free and open source project, to build a living museum with nothing more than a few thousand plastic bags and many volunteers, is the perfect tool for this. It brings people together and reminds us that when you have this strong, local connections, as Joaquin says, magic happens. This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance. Read more about Aerocene in our interview with Claudia Aboaf, a writer, teacher and astrologer who has worked closely with the collective. More about the guest: Joaquín Ezcurra is a cartographer, artist, and researcher whose practice explores alternative ways of seeing and representing natural phenomena, combining science with sensitivity in the context of the climate emergency. He has collaborated with leading cultural and scientific institutions worldwide, and since 2017 has been a core collaborator with the Aerocene Foundation and the worldwide Aerocene community.
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    59 min
  • Configurations of Air: Matter, Traces and Making a Landscape

    Configurations of Air: Matter, Traces and Making a Landscape
    Oct 9 2025

    In episode three, Susan Mathews continues her conversation with Mădălina Diaconu, a researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria and author of Aesthetics of Weather (2024). Mădălina works on environmental aesthetics, urban aesthetics and phenomenology of perception. Please listen to the first part of this conversation in episode two to hear about the need for a holistic view of our immersion in the atmosphere, thermic auras, and multisensory perception as the basis for empathy.

    Our conversation began with tornadoes, their radical dynamic form that makes air visible and creates a figure that is both perfect and dangerous, an ambivalence which diverges from the classical experience of beauty as harmony. There are other figures of the sky like clouds, lightning and the rainbow, but Mădălina was drawn to the tornado’s uncontrolled genesis and evolution as it challenges the assumption of the Anthropocene that humans can manipulate and domesticate everything.

    She spoke of the limitations of equating materiality with solid matter. Water and air are also material, as are light and other electromagnetic waves, radiation and other phenomena. Mădălina invites a shift not just of how matter is conceptualized, but of the traditional representation of matter as something passive that can be manipulated by humans to instead recognise that we are not the only form of matter who can be assigned activity or agency.

    The conversation then moved on to an interrogation of the human fixation on landscapes. Mădălina introduced the concept of landscapability to capture our tendency to compose, through analogy, a landscape even when land may not be present, say on the Arctic ocean as we are surrounded by air, water and ice. She also highlighted the values conveyed within our definition of landscapes, including emotional value such as patriotism, of topophilia. This theory of landscapes is also contextually informed by its origins in landscape painting in Italy and central Europe—a theory emerging from a different culture would not have the same principles. For example, one formed in the Amazonian forests would not have the particular principle of panoramic views.

    Mădălina’s study also includes work on the tactile aesthetics of cityscapes. A city is full of microclimates. On a hot summer day, you can enter a building and experience shadows and, in the last century, air conditioning. A glass houses can cultivate tomatoes earlier than the climate outside allows. This lack of a monotonous thermic landscape is a performance of civilization but so is paradoxically the creation of blandscapes such as shopping malls. The question of how to cope with and mitigate the consequences of climate change is not only for philosophers, but for architects and urban planners. The solution is not to build more capsules for a select group who can afford them; we need to develop strategies of common survival.

    Finally, we discussed the idea of traces. Mădălina spoke of how a trace is a kind of material signature left by someone or by something. They are not ruins but remainders. Traces are present, while also suggesting an absence. Some traces are more enduring than a life itself. Waste is also a trace, though an unwanted one. Some of these waste traces are incontrollable and some, like radioactive waste, are indestructible.

    Mădălina closes by urging us to pay attention to the things that surround us in everyday life, all worthy of our time and attention, that could open the doors of our perception to truly atmospheric living.

    This season of The Subverse has been produced by Tushar Das. A special thank you to Julian Wey for access to his Qumquat studio and Daniel Schwenger for his assistance.

    More about the guest:

    Mădălina Diaconu studied Philosophy (PhD, PhD) and Theology (MA) in Bucharest and Vienna. She teaches as Dozentin at the Department of Philosophy and as lecturer at the Department of Romance Studies of the University of Vienna. She is member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Aesthetics, Studia Phaenomenologica and polylog, a magazine about intercultural philosophy. She authored eleven monographs and (co)edited several books on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, the ontology of art, the phenomenology of the senses, the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, urban sensescapes, environmental ethics, animality, atmosphere, and eco-phenomenology. Her latest book is Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury 2024). You can read more about her work here.
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    36 min
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