Zero.Dawn: Future Visions of the Generative Anthropocene
2023
Speculative Design, Generative AI Documentary, Photography, Publication Design
The Singapore Green Plan 2030 describes a future in the language of policy: targets, percentages, net-zero timelines, and strategic initiatives. What it does not produce are images. Zero.Dawn fills that visual void—producing photographically specific futures tied to real locations.
The project deploys fifty documentary photographs of actual Singapore sites, feeding them into Midjourney through style referencing to generate speculative successors aligned with the plan’s five sustainability pillars. Every spread anchors the real source in a smaller frame alongside its AI-generated future. An accompanying advertising campaign subverts public expectation by deploying these visions across billboards, MRT stations, and urban LED screens—presented not as artistic conjecture, but as current public service announcements.
For more information on the initiative, see: https://www.greenplan.gov.sg/
The Method
Fifty documentary photographs taken across Singapore—a fish market, a mangrove wetland, a rainy expressway, a public plaza, and a harbor waterway—are fed into Midjourney using the /sref (style reference) method. This anchors each AI generation to the exact visual DNA of that specific real-world site, ensuring the imagined futures are not generic sci-fi, but geographically grounded. The source photograph is never discarded; it remains smaller on the page beside the generated vision, serving as evidentiary context for the distance traveled. A grey, overcast mudflat with exposed roots in 2024 transforms into a luminous, vertical tower of hydroponic glass and growing systems in 2037. Each frame is a speculative time-stamp, calibrated precisely to the Green Plan's ambitious timeline.
The Method
Fifty documentary photographs taken across Singapore—a fish market, a mangrove wetland, a rainy expressway, a public plaza, and a harbor waterway—are fed into Midjourney using the /sref (style reference) method. This anchors each AI generation to the exact visual DNA of that specific real-world site, ensuring the imagined futures are not generic sci-fi, but geographically grounded. The source photograph is never discarded; it remains smaller on the page beside the generated vision, serving as evidentiary context for the distance traveled. A grey, overcast mudflat with exposed roots in 2024 transforms into a luminous, vertical tower of hydroponic glass and growing systems in 2037. Each frame is a speculative time-stamp, calibrated precisely to the Green Plan's ambitious timeline.
The Publication
The five Green Plan 2030 initiatives—City in Nature, Energy Reset, Sustainable Living, Green Economy, Resilient Future—provide the core structure for the publication. Each initiative generates its own distinct cluster of speculative scenarios, visually synthesized from the source photographs. A coastal park in 2035 features carbon-absorbing beach forests and breathing walls supporting symbiotic microbial communities. A bustling traffic interchange in 2041 integrates bio-engineered plant minds, maglev transit, and supersonic hyperloop infrastructure. Deep beneath the city, a marine conservation facility is maintained by a diver in a biomimetic suit tending to bioprinted coral cities. Each scenario is described with the precise, clinical specificity of a technical brief—as if these advanced facilities are merely waiting for construction to break ground.
The Lexicon
Running through the publication as a dense, uninterrupted typeset text block is the project's prompting lexicon. It operates less as a glossary and more as a linguistic texture, a signal of the scale of imagination required. The keyword cloud collapses the plausible (phytoremediation, aeroponic, maglev) with the near-horizon (graphene oxide, carbon nanotubes, molecular beam epitaxy) and the genuinely exotic (Bose-Einstein condensates, superfluid helium, zero-point energy). By presenting these technical terms with typographic neutrality, the lexicon underscores a critical provocation: how far must scientific imagination stretch before we actually build the infrastructure needed to survive the Anthropocene?
The Campaign
The advertising campaign recontextualizes the generated futures as interventional public art, deploying them across the urban fabric. Billboards, MRT station walls, and large-format digital LED screens carry these hyper-real visions beside stark, unresolved provocations: Are You Prepared? or End of the world, or a new beginning? One prominent urban screen simply asks, TECHNOLOGY: THE LAST HOPE?, accompanied by a QR code inviting engagement. The visual fidelity of the AI renders allows them to pass as current architectural renderings for real-life projects. By inserting itself directly into daily circulation, the campaign forces pedestrians to question what is already being built—and what is merely being wished into existence.
Ballard, J. G. — The Drowned World (1962)
Beatley, T. — Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning (2011)
Dunne, A. & Raby, F. — Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (2013)
Orlowski, J. — Chasing Coral (2017)
Robinson, K. S. — New York 2140 (2017)
Singapore Green Plan 2030 — singaporegreenplan.gov.sg
WOHA — Garden City Mega City: Rethinking Cities for the Age of Global Warming (2016)
scroll to top