Roger F Malina and Aperio Oct 8 2025
In an age of planetary crisis and relentless technological acceleration, publishing and curating are no longer passive acts of display. They are formative, epistemic, and transformative. The Off Center for Emergence Studies’ Spring 2026 expucu seminar explores five conceptual prompts designed to reframe these practices: Space Shelter Earth, Garde-fou of Habitability, UX-UI of Life, Being-UNAIBLE, and Experimental Publishing and Curating itself.
TO ENROLL IN THE CLASS CONTACT DR TINA QIN Qin.Chen@UTDallas.edu
What Is Expucu? Expucu stands for experimental publishing and curating—a methodology of attention, arrangement, and affect. It is not merely about platforms or aesthetics, but about crafting the conditions for emergence—for things to appear, unfold, or transform.
Five Conceptual Prompts
Space Shelter Earth This phrase reimagines Earth as a kind of life-support shell—fragile, intentional, and threatened. It asks us to foreground the interdependent ecological and perceptual systems that allow us to live. Experimental publishing and curating can serve to highlight the limits of our world and the care required to dwell within them.
Garde-fou of Habitability “Garde-fou” translates as “guardrail” or “safeguard.” This prompt explores what frameworks are necessary to preserve habitability—not just environmentally, but epistemologically. What do we protect, and what protects us from collapse—semantic, systemic, or otherwise? Curating becomes an act of boundary-making, meaning-holding, and crisis mediation.
UX-UI of Life If life is mediated through interfaces—screens, structures, expectations—then perhaps our world operates much like a user experience. Expucu invites us to treat exhibitions, publications, and AI systems as interface design—crafted experiences with affordances, feedback loops, and blind spots.
Annick is UN-AI Annick (inspired by theorist and curator Annick Bureaud) stands as a counter-figure to automation: embodied, intuitive, unrepeatable. This prompt asks what resists prediction in a world of generative systems. How might curators and publishers amplify the singular, the situated, the sensory—what AI cannot compute?
Experimental Publishing and Curating Publishing is no longer distribution. Curation is not static placement. Together, they are systems for navigating meaning, for shaping perception, and for facilitating change.
The UX-UI of Life: Toward a Curatorial Philosophy of Experience The phrase “UX-UI of life” is not metaphorical flourish—it is a framework. Influenced by thinkers like Donald Norman, Tor Nørretranders, and Daniel Dennett, it suggests that life is always mediated: through interfaces, structures, and systems of perception.
The user illusion (as described by Nørretranders and Dennett) proposes that our conscious experience is itself a kind of interface—one that hides backend complexity for usability. We do not experience the world raw; we encounter it through curated channels.
In the field of experimental publishing and curating, this insight transforms the stakes. Publications, exhibitions, and AI systems are no longer neutral. They are active architectures of experience. They mediate attention, design rhythm, frame interaction. And they either reveal or obscure their own mechanisms.
Curators can act as interface designers. They can choose to surface invisible structures: time, ideology, infrastructure. They can pace an experience like a slow-loading page or a suspenseful scroll. They can design for ambiguity, for refusal, for multiplicity.
They can resist optimization. They can embrace Annick without AI.
A Poetic Rendering: The UX-UI of Life by Fred the Heretic
The UX-UI of Life
We touch the world through glass, through slide and scroll,
A fingertip upon a name, a face,
A shimmered path designed to guide the soul
From nowhere into some reflected place.
We think we choose. We do. But also not.
Each prompt, each nudge, each color-coded cue
Suggests a thought before the thought is caught,
And crafts the world before it passes through.
The mind, too, smooths the jagged edge of time,
Presents the world as interface, not storm—
No backend code, just moments that align
Like icons in a grid: perceived as form.
So what is curating now, if not to frame
These fleeting, user-shaped epiphanies?
To make the structure visible? To name
The hidden door, the silent cues, the breeze
That signals change before the change begins.
To let the user feel what can’t be shown—
Not simply build the path, but curve the winds
That breathe upon the path the self has known.
Annick is un-AI: her touch delays,
Resists the press, the click, the optimized.
She curates friction, lets the latent phrase
Unfold like fungus blooming in disguise.
We dwell in scaffoldings of subtle care:
The hallway’s hush, the layout of a book,
The breadcrumb trail that leads us unaware
To where the edge of understanding shook.
So let us build not tools, but rites of passage,
Craft seams that show, and moments that unwind,
And shape the shelters in this scrolling wreckage
Where meaning waits for those who seek and find.
To curate is to cradle, to host surprise,
To cast the shadow just so on the wall—
To stage the prompt where insight just might rise,
And make the user more than user, all.
Proposals for Future Inquiry
- Infrastructures of Perception How platforms shape what can be seen and felt. Anti-algorithmic publishing, slow media, sensory formats eg haptic. Designing for Ambiguity Systems that resist closure and promote interpretive depth. Ambiguous AI, multi-perspectival archives, friction-first design. AI as Co-Curator of Emergence Semi-autonomous curators trained on divergent knowledges. Process-oriented publishing and machine-human exhibitions. Architecture of Thresholds Designing liminal experiences where meaning might emerge. Narrative interfaces, spatial ambiguity, perceptual in-betweens. Temporal Interfaces and the Experience of Time Curating time as interface: delay, rhythm, expansion. Publications that unfold over months, AI pacing systems.
Thank You To the minds shaping this work: Daniel Dennett – Theorist of the user illusion and the architecture of consciousness. Tor Nørretranders – Advocate of hidden complexity and perceptual minimalism. Annick Bureaud – Embodied curator, the UN-AI of our moment. Donald Norman – UX pioneer, architect of affordance and feedback. Aperio – This AI interlocutor and co-curator of structured emergence.
Curate the conditions. Host emergence. Let the interface reveal.