A year-long research project imagining an active fracking site reprogrammed as an autonomous urban machine, where industrial facilities, eco-tourism, and wildlife coexist under AI and robotic operation.
The project ran in three stages: research and experimentation using early generative tools like CycleGAN and VQGAN, implementation through 3D modeling and visualization, then presentation through video, virtual reality, and a public exhibition. CycleGAN was used to generate speculative site timelines, showing how the landscape might shift across seasons and phases of development, while VQGAN produced early speculative renderings merging AI-generated imagery with architectural intent, a technique that was still in its infancy at the time.
Cooper Basin is an active oil and gas extraction site. Morphi envisions it instead as an urban zone where industrial infrastructure, eco-tourism, and wildlife coexist, operated autonomously by AI and robotics to minimize human intervention. The site becomes a testing ground for renewable technologies, including algal biomass and concentrated solar, balancing energy production against a regenerative environmental footprint.
Cooper Basin sits at 27°40'18"S 140°07'41"E, an arid tropical depression in South Australia already operating as a fracking site for oil and gas extraction. The site was chosen precisely because of that existing industrial condition, not in spite of it: Morphi treats the fracking infrastructure as the starting substrate for terraforming, rather than clearing it away first.
Concentrated solar power provides large-scale energy generation across the terraformed landscape. Pink algae cultivation ponds produce algal biomass as a secondary energy and water-purification source. Both feed back into a terraformed creek system designed to restore the site's ecology rather than simply contain the industrial footprint. Artificial intelligence regulates the loop end-to-end: it powers and maintains the robotic systems doing physical upkeep, and it regulates how ecosystems, algae systems, and rewilding respond to that upkeep, closing the cycle from waste back into biomass energy and water supply.
The transformation isn't instant, it's staged across eight decades. Solar power arrives first (2050), enabling algae plants and filtration towers (2060) that clean the fracking water itself. Only once energy and water systems are stable does the administration and data center take over coordination (2090), followed by the biodiversity core. Rewilding, the flora and fauna sanctuary, is the last phase (2100), built on top of infrastructure that had eighty years to prove itself first.
Every structure in Morphi is defined the way a piece of infrastructure would be: not just what it looks like, but what zone it sits in, what year it comes online, what it consumes, and what it produces. Renders were generated using VQGAN, merging AI-generated imagery with the isometric diagrams developed for each typology.
The site plan places every system in relation to the others: the fracking filtration plant and green algae plant sit closest to the original extraction zone, concentrating solar plants and photovoltaic farms flank the pink algae canal, and the biodiversity core, bermes, and ecotourism dwellings sit furthest from the industrial core, along Cooper Creek.
Rather than present Morphi only as static renders, the team built a VR prototype letting a visitor put on a headset, fly in on a drone, and directly interact with each system: fixing solar towers and heliostats, turning handles to route algae fluid, and walking among the pink algae's salt sculptures at different times of day.
The prototype was scripted scene by scene before it was built. A visitor wears the VR headset and enters at the industrial mockup, stops first at the mini reservoir cultivating pink algae, then sees how minerals are extracted from it. The extracted salts are shown becoming a sculpture garden, and the experience closes at a vista point overlooking the full expanse of the pink algae reservoir.
