Artist Riley Hooker and architect Nick Meehan’s SIT(UATION), on view April 21–July 16, 2023, is a mutable seating and display system that situates people in a media-rich environment to center the body in the act of reading. The design pulls from 1960s radical architecture, post-modern seating design a-la Peter Opsvik and Terje Ekstrøm, educational methods developed for neurodivergent students, embodiment and mindfulness practices, and anarchic political theories.

SIT(UATION) is an ongoing, collectively authored, mutable seating environment inspired by the Physarum Polycephalum (Slime mold). Its behavior mimics the decentralized intelligence of the common slime mold as observed in the films of Stanford Biologist John Bonner. In a design sense the work borrows from the utopian aims of radical architecture in the 1960s, modular seating design, and the utility of inflatable architecture. In a functional sense the work was conceived of as a reading environment, and pulls from multi sensory stimulation practices developed for neurodivergent students. SIT(UATION) has evolved to play a more general role in encouraging experimentation and play — challenging assumptions around what we can and cannot do with our bodies in an institutional context. This iteration of the work has unfolded in three distinct stages, reminiscent of the slime mold life cycle. The 4th stage mimics the reproductive phase in the release of a new publication. The book SIT(UATION) is slated for a spring 2024 release with New York based publisher Gender Fail.