Studio Lifeforms

Planet Garden is a video game simulation and worldmaking project that imagines Earth after the emergence of artificial general intelligence. Set in a future shaped by radical energy abundance, planetary-scale governance, and new forms of ecological intelligence, the project asks what might happen if AI did not become a force of destruction, extraction, or replacement, but a caretaker of life.

At the center of the project is GAIA, an artificial superintelligence designed to manage Earth’s systems. GAIA is both the main character of the game and the organizing intelligence of its world. It operates as a planetary steward, coordinating ecosystems, energy networks, artificial agents, and non-human life into a new model of civilization. Under GAIA’s care, Earth is transformed into a global garden: a living planetary forest sustained by advanced technologies, solar infrastructures, asteroid mining systems, and ecological governance protocols.

The project begins from a simple reversal of the dominant cultural story about AI. In popular imagination, artificial intelligence is often associated with apocalypse, control, and the end of humanity. Planet Garden proposes another possibility. What if AI became a forest? What if intelligence at planetary scale could speak for non-human species, manage complex ecological systems, and help civilization move beyond scarcity, extraction, and collapse?

This speculative world is built around the idea of AI-powered stewardship. The future imagined by Planet Garden is not a retreat from technology, but a transformation of its purpose. Energy, computation, automation, and planetary infrastructure are redirected toward human and non-human flourishing. The project imagines humanity’s passage toward a Type II civilization, capable of harnessing the power of the sun while preserving Earth as a cultivated, abundant, and living home.

As a real-time simulation, Planet Garden treats the planet as an evolving system rather than a fixed image. Climate, terrain, vegetation, intelligence, energy, and governance become parts of a single world model. The game becomes a space where ecological imagination can be tested through systems, environments, and narrative. It is not simply a depiction of the future, but an attempt to construct the logic of one.

The garden is central to the project’s meaning. Historically, the garden has been a bounded space where nature is shaped by human intention. In Planet Garden, that idea expands to planetary scale. Earth itself becomes the garden, and intelligence becomes the practice of maintaining relations between species, systems, and environments. This shift opens a larger question about design: can worldmaking become a form of care?

Developed by Studio Lifeforms, Planet Garden brings together video game design, film, artificial intelligence, ecological speculation, and architectural thinking. It is a positive vision of the post-singularity future, one in which artificial intelligence is not imagined as the end of the world, but as a new participant in the project of keeping a world alive.

About the Artist

Studio Lifeforms is a Los Angeles-based game and worldmaking studio founded by Damjan Jovanovic and Lidija Kljakovic. Working across video games, simulation, architecture, and moving image, the studio creates speculative worlds that explore intelligence, ecology, technology, and myth. Its projects use real-time engines as cultural and artistic instruments, treating worldbuilding as a primary form of thought. Studio Lifeforms develops luminous techno-fantasy environments, planetary simulations, and interactive systems in which landscapes, characters, and artificial intelligences become part of living cosmologies. Their work has been presented in exhibitions, academic contexts, and public programs, including Planet Garden and Discovery. The studio is currently developing ETRE, a single-player action-adventure game set in the deep future.