By the time Aberrant Plexus opened, the Institute for Psychogametous Life had already existed for several years. It had departments, reports, conservation procedures, compromised archives, and a history extending beyond the conditions of its formation.
In Chimeric Herbarium, the IPGL appears as an organisation devoted to the study of psychogametous lifeforms: organisms that propagate through image, language, desire, and perception. Its specimens do not require genetic continuity or remain bound to a single material. They survive through contact with a receptive host and symbolic reproduction.
Until November 2025, however, the Institute had never occupied a building. Certainly not in East London.
Over the course of 2025, a purpose-built shed in my garden gradually filled with props and construction materials. Real laboratory equipment accumulated alongside rubber flooring, office telephones, metres of conduit, vinyl curtains, steel industrial cabinets, an enormous 1950s surgical lamp, and a hydraulic medical chair, the last three of which now grace my lounge. A gargantuan film-props warehouse yielded a van-load of vintage electronics, some salvaged from submarines, others from laboratories. Posters were produced for the walls, two performances developed for the initiation ceremony, and two further events curated as part of the residency. Altogether, around thirty people contributed their work and time to Aberrant Plexus.
For Aberrant Plexus, I collaborated with artist Peachthief and sound virtuoso Takatsuna Mukai to transform two storeys of Metamorphika Studio in Hackney into an active IPGL test site.
Peachthief under observation by Takatsuna Mukai
Peachthief took on the physical production of the laboratory, translating my designs into CAD files and connecting me with the factories that fabricated them. An experienced prop-maker, they proved invaluable in navigating the many pesky practicalities of my otherworldly plans through numerous Zoom calls and several in-person quests. Most crucially, Peachthief brought the first iteration of the alien mycelium of my dreams to life. And when the time came to build the laboratory, he built it, while I painted walls and sci-fi panels, stapled what seemed like miles of plastic sheeting to the ceiling, set-dressed, and fretted over infinite minutiae.
Takatsuna Mukai served as sound director for Aberrant Plexus, developing the sonic architecture that ran throughout the Institute: institutional transmissions, mechanical ambience, mycelial slithering, and the shifting pulses of Lab C. He also created a population of individual alien voices, motion-triggered and concealed throughout the test site, which revealed themselves only when someone entered their range. Some encounters lasted only a few seconds: a screech from a cabinet, a howl from behind the washbasin, a hiss somewhere just out of sight.
My most ambitious exhibition to date, Aberrant Plexus took twelve years to imagine, one year to produce, and just ten days to build. Ten non-stop days working with a small, dedicated team, punctuated by broken nails, minor injuries, and bagels when we remembered to eat. Every corner of the 1,500-square-foot space was incorporated into the Institute, including the toilet.
Once built, the Institute was meant to be traversed rather than viewed from a distance.
Entry began through a silver corridor washed in magenta light, with a low-frequency hum hovering just above hearing. This was the de/contamination threshold, a membrane between the street and the Institute. The sensory adjustment was subtle and deliberate. Beyond it, looking from a distance was no longer enough.
The Intake Zone held the Institute’s records: documents tracing the laboratory's inception and speculative papers contributed by guest writers and philosophers, alongside medical equipment and specimen samples. A containment tank with heavy rubber gloves waited at the centre, accessible to anyone daring enough to probe the fluorescent slime for alien larvae.
The counter dispensed three cocktails developed specifically for Aberrant Plexus by Count Dramula, with a menu built around mushroom-infused whisky, pandan and clarified coconut milk, and gin with Sichuan pepper and clementine.
Further in, the Sanitation Node compressed storage and xenobiological overgrowth into a narrow transitional space. IV stands, mould-flecked beakers, sealed test tubes, plastic sheeting, and myceliated posters crowded the room. Institutional directives and fungal speech, recorded by Takatsuna Mukai and me, drifted from hidden speakers. A telephone mapped an unseen administrative network responsible for field deployment, containment breaches, interspecies ethics, adaptation support, and maintenance of the Institute’s systems.
Upstairs, the Sensory Pollinarium returned the original Alien Botany archive to circulation. In the Institute's records, a Pollinarium is a chamber designed to induce contact with Chimaeran ecologies. Exposure may result in image germination: unfamiliar formations persisting within the host's visual and symbolic life until they find some route into the physical world.
My drawings lined the room among changing light, lenses, screens, and purpose-made apparatus. A monitor built into a corner console played my animated short, Galea Displodo Interaction. Cristiano Di Martino's sculptures writhed above. From a rupture in the plastic ceiling, Piotr Bockowski's clear mycelial structure descended toward the laboratory below.
The specimens had been placed behind glass and beneath lenses, but containment was already compromised: observation itself constitutes exposure.
At the centre of the Pollinarium, beneath the surgical lamp, Carolina Malware worked as a pollinator, transferring Alien Botany forms from the walls onto human hosts. The drawings passed through another hand and another technique, accepting distortion as part of their evolution. Once carried outside the gallery, they entered lives and environments inaccessible to the original image. This was close to the process I had described in writing, but its physical consequences were different. A transmitted image is altered by the body that receives it. Its future depends upon conditions the originating artist cannot supervise.
Downstairs, beyond translucent cobalt membranes, Lab C contained Sample Δ-MC7, a responsive xenomycelial specimen reconstructed from residue recovered inside the capsule that carried the original Alien Botany archive. Its projected body spread across the walls in luminous branching structures, contracting and evolving as visitors entered its range. Motion and proximity alter its colour, density, and rate of growth. Anyone approaching the sample becomes part of the conditions affecting it, and vice versa.
On Chimaera, this neural plexus interconnects life through continuous exchange. In Lab C, Δ-MC7’s escalating shapes and colours drew people closer to the projection and, often, closer to one another. Takatsuna Mukai's sound moved continuously through the room, sometimes resembling the building's own mechanics, elsewhere gathering around the specimen in low pulses. Slime-filled tanks, light, sound, and human presence operated as a single feedback system. The laboratory retained its metabolism even when no one was there.
What the Institute describes as psychogametous replication became tangible here. Perception feeds action; action feeds form. The laboratory no longer distinguished between observer, operator, and specimen. Contamination was participation.
Once the doors opened, the Institute began acquiring experiences of its own.
David Varhegyi joined the Institute for its first public session as Dr Ferenczi, the infected Senior Containment Liaison of IPGL’s Eastern Division. His role included directing visitors, maintaining the laboratory rhythms, and doing his best to conceal subtle symptoms of contamination that surfaced as the evening progressed. David’s experience with immersive performance made that restraint possible. The Institute continued operating around its visitors; instruction and anomaly became part of the conditions of attendance.
Nearly three hundred people were processed through the Institute that evening.
In the Sensory Pollinarium, Fung Neo and Laboranta initiated Psychogametous Transmission Study, a performance I wrote and directed around the instant when looking becomes contact. The gaze acts as a vector; the nervous system as an incubation site.
The work followed an otherworldly organism from physical presence through visual and cognitive stimulus into bodily behaviour. Sterile research routine gave way to small involuntary movements: a tremor, a prolonged blink, a hand beginning to trace the contours of a specimen first on paper, then in empty space. With repeated exposure, those gestures began to mimic the organisms themselves. Drawing turned compulsive, language fractured, and the body started reproducing what had entered through the eyes.
By the final stage, containment itself became transmissive; the infected host was restrained, but the researcher attempting to contain her was infected in turn.
The procedure unfolded at close range, while Δ-MC7 continued its slow growth in the laboratory below.
Later, Thanamnesis materialised inside Lab C. Written and produced by me and directed by Charlie Jimenez, the work brought Zuza Kurko, Shemi Codjoe, Zara Sands, and Kuba Pawelczak into the Institute as distant Chimaeran descendants of the original hybrids in the Alien Botany series, with masks by Weronika Przysada, costumes by Oujiana, and sound by Takatsuna Mukai.
Over millennia, their human DNA had thinned until humanity survived only as a distant echo, out of reach. They had lived for generations among the remnants of the Novy Mir crash, long after their original meaning was lost, developing rituals around objects and gestures they no longer understood. They longed for what had been lost without knowing what it was.
At the same time, Δ-MC7 was breaking containment on Earth, trying to reconnect with the Chimaeran neural network from which it had been severed. The hybrids reached toward their lost humanity as Δ-MC7 reached back toward Chimaera. Those signals crossed space and time, bringing the ritual into Lab C.
The creatures continued moving, apparently unaware of where they had arrived, their rhythmic, synchronised gestures recalling the wreckage of Novy Mir, specimen collection, control panels, death poses, and the original exchanges between human, animal, and plant bodies.
As laboratory equipment malfunctioned under xenomycelial interference, an archival human voice crackled over the intercom. Somehow, it crossed that unimaginable distance, and one hybrid remembered.
Kenji Siratori's Xenopoetic Report of Arthropod Vectors was released inside the Institute that night. In the book, language itself is a reproductive medium, mutating through syntax, contamination, and repeated passage between human and nonhuman systems. Only eleven hand-numbered copies were produced. The first became a living edition, altered with organic matter over two months. The book entered Aberrant Plexus as both document and active agent.
During the following weeks, the laboratory acquired events I had not written into its history. Tattooed specimens left the building. Visitors changed Δ-MC7 through ordinary movement. Performances altered how later audiences inhabited the rooms. During Slime Sunday, Laboranta and Xenia Black, under layers of translucent matter, became difficult to fix on paper; what began as life drawing turned into an attempt to document forms in continuous mutation.
By the final weekend, Lab C had accumulated its own memory.
The Deactivation Protocol began with Waterflower, working with living fungal instruments and wet systems. Light drifted across Lab C like something waking. Δ-MC7 swelled and shifted as the first sounds entered the room, its tendrils rippling, shimmering, and changing colour. Sound pooled, spilled, and returned. For a while, the xenomycelium seemed to find new voices through its terrestrial counterparts.
Aleks Zamyarski followed as an IPGL laboratory technician with a laser harp built specifically for Aberrant Plexus. Consoles glowed and muttered, lights pulsed, and steam seeped from unseen machinery. Red beams rose through the haze around the specimen tanks. His hands interrupted the light, and interruption became sound. Strobing flashes and an alarm signalled contamination, beginning the shutdown sequence.
ZeroSun : Kurätaka returned to the Institute as Dr Vikentiy Petrov and Dr Timka Mukhin, former custodians of the facility, excellent scientists, and enthusiastic performers of late-night electronic music, with vodka included in the salary. They reconstructed long nights inside Lab C's failing systems: experiments running late, antidotes that did not quite work, and music played anyway. Because that is what you do when the world does not end on schedule.
MutsumiNeiro completed the Deactivation Protocol. Their performance had been part of Aberrant Plexus from the project’s earliest stages; I first encountered their practice through their butoh workshops. The closing sequence moved as a single, continuous breath.
In Lab C, Mutsumi and Neiro were twin impulses flickering across the organism one last time. Each action travelled into the other: motion to consequence, stillness to voltage. At moments, two magnetic bodies seemed to complete a circuit; at others, each moved within a separate time. Their dance of decay and metamorphosis merged with the mutating systems of Aberrant Plexus.
When the movement stopped, their pulse remained in the room.
The following week, the temporary IPGL test site was decommissioned. Tanks were emptied. Tubing and plastic sheeting came away from the walls. Instruments, drawings, and specimen records returned to their cases. After three weeks in containment, Δ-MC7 was finally free. A few days later, I painted the Pollinarium white again.
I had built a laboratory intended to study symbolic life. It began producing evidence.
The first testing window is complete.
Visit IPGL online. More documentation and research to come.
Buy Chimeric Herbarium. The Alien Botany archive, signed edition of 300.