As rising CO2 makes the ocean more acidic, coral is losing the calcium carbonate that forms its skeleton, pushed out of the only habitat it has ever known. Syntheco imagines an alternative: a synthetic ecosystem where coral survives not in the sea, but in the middle of the desert.
Each formation was generated with AI prompting, then refined and curated across dozens of iterations to build a coherent, believable world, impossible in reality yet familiar in form. The project is presented in two parts: an Index of wide desert scenes, and a Specimens archive isolating individual formations in the style of a classic natural history collection.
Syntheco is less a prediction than a question about what people have come to define as natural, and what they’re willing to imagine in its place.
https://syntheco.framer.website/
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