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Artworks
Niceaunties
Auntlantis: Day In the Life Of , 2024AI Video Animation
Sound design by Niceaunties, AI generated music by Niceaunties
Auntlantis is a digital video series within the Auntieverse, an ongoing speculative world-building project by Niceaunties that reimagines ageing, consumerism, environmentalism, and cultural identity through AI-driven storytelling, satire, and social commentary. The Auntieverse presents alternative futures where aunties—figures often overlooked or stereotyped—exist beyond societal expectations, navigating surreal economies, speculative cities, and imagined ecologies.
Within this broader universe, Auntlantis emerges as a distinct conceptual location, a parallel reality where the environmental consequences of overconsumption and pollution have created an aquatic world transformed by human waste. Here, aunties become unlikely caretakers, cleaning up oceans filled with discarded materials while engaging with plastic-infused marine life and navigating surreal industrial waterscapes.
Auntlantis: A Speculative World of Ocean Waste and Human Impact
Inspired by Plato’s Atlantis and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Auntlantis is a response to the increasing commodification of nature, mass production, and the tension between human ingenuity and ecological destruction. The series explores themes of overconsumption, adaptation, and the normalization of environmental collapse, portraying a world where ocean plastics have not just polluted the water but have become fully integrated into marine life, architecture, and daily existence.
Originally developed as a three-part series in 2024, Auntlantis has since expanded into a five-part narrative (2024–2025), each episode serving as a commentary on the cyclical nature of waste, the illusion of sustainability, and humanity’s passive acceptance of ecological decline.
The Five Episodes of Auntlantis
Each episode presents a distinct visual and conceptual narrative, exploring different aspects of pollution, adaptation, and the consequences of unchecked consumption:
Sweeping the Floor – Aunties clean plastic waste from beaches and the ocean floor, but the effort is endless—new waste always returns. A metaphor for the Sisyphean struggle of environmental cleanup efforts.
Workshop – Inside an industrial repurposing plant, waste is processed, transformed, and rebranded, questioning the effectiveness of recycling in a system driven by mass production.
A Day in the Life Of – Set in a world where plastic waste has been fully integrated into daily life, aunties shop at the Jelly Outlet Malls, commute on conveyor belts of discarded goods, and exist in an ecosystem that has adapted to artificial materials.
Trashy Friends – A reflection on microplastic consumption, where creatures unknowingly ingest waste and gradually transform into hybrid synthetic beings, mirroring the contamination of real marine life.
Vacation – Aunties indulge in a surreal vacation landscape made entirely of synthetic materials, lounging on plastic beaches and floating in jelly pools, unaware—or indifferent—to the irony of their surroundings.
Artistic and Conceptual Approach
Through a blend of humour, dystopian surrealism, and environmental critique, Auntlantis presents a world where plastic is no longer waste, but a material reality. The aunties, in their playful yet unsettling roles, embody the contradictions of care and complicity, action and inaction, illustrating how societies adapt to environmental crises rather than preventing them.
Recurring motifs include:
Water & Plastic Hybrids – Visualizing the irreversible entanglement of pollution and marine ecosystems.
Repetitive Labour & Automation – Aunties working tirelessly to "fix" the problem while remaining part of the system perpetuating it.
Tourism & Consumerism – The repackaging of environmental damage into marketable, sanitized experiences.
Auntlantis Within the Auntieverse
As part of the broader Auntieverse, Auntlantis expands the project’s exploration of feminine labour, social structures, and speculative futures. Unlike other Auntieverse works, which focus on urban speculation, Auntlantis submerges aunties into an ecological dystopia, where they perform both acts of care and passive acceptance, questioning how humanity collectively responds to environmental disasters.
Conclusion: Why This Work Matters
Auntlantis presents an allegorical future, where the consequences of overproduction and waste culture are not just external threats but fully integrated into daily life. Through AI-generated visuals, narrative world-building, and critical humour, the work challenges viewers to rethink their own roles in consumption, sustainability, and environmental action.
By embedding playful absurdity within urgent social critique, Auntlantis disrupts conventional conversations around climate change, offering a speculative yet eerily familiar world where plastic has outlived the natural world—and where adaptation, rather than prevention, has become the norm.Copyright The Artist
