Future Botanica

Future Botanica is an augmented reality app that enables users, in collaboration with an AI, to design speculative 3D ecosystems with new nature. These virtual ecosystems are then planted into the existing physical nature, allowing exploration of ideas, expectations, fears, and desires regarding future nature. Users experience that any addition or alteration to an ecosystem affects the functioning of the entire ecosystem.

Future Botanica  invites people to imagine, design, and grow possible futures for nature. Blending digital life with real-world landscapes, the app transforms parks, gardens, museums, festival grounds, and urban spaces into living environments for speculative plants and organisms. Through their phone, each participant becomes a “planter,” shaping an ecosystem of new life forms inspired by science, storytelling, environmental data, and collective imagination.

In this work, the visitor becomes a planter. Not a master of nature, but a participant within it. Each user is invited to imagine future environmental conditions; rising waters, altered soils, pollution, repair, absence, adaptation and to create life forms able to inhabit these shifting worlds. These beings are designed through a dialogue between human imagination, ecological thinking, and AI-assisted image creation, generating a continuously evolving archive of future biodiversity

Future Botanica is both playful and profound. It offers an accessible way to explore ecological complexity, systems thinking, and interdependence through learning by doing. No planter has complete control; each choice is shaped by shifting conditions, by other participants, and by the wider environment. In this way, the project encourages a less human-centered view of life on Earth one rooted in adaptation, coexistence, and mutual influence.

Premiered at MU Hybrid Art Space, in Eindhoven (October 19 – November 10)
and IDFA doclab, competition Digital Storytelling, in Amsterdam (November 12-24)

Listen to the voicesofvr podcast #1514: Creating GenAI Flower Ecosystem with “Future Botanica” AR App

Production details

Future Botanica is a Polymorf and Studio Biarritz production
Designed by Polymorf, Marcel van Brakel and Hazal Erturkan
Commissioned by: MU Hybrid Art Space
Supported by: The creative industries fund Digital Culture and Fentener van Vlissingen Fund and the Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant.