When you attack the boss in Camoflux, the landscape wins

In Leo Castañeda's Camoflux games, attacking the boss is the fastest way to lose. The boss is the landscape—a waterfall, a mountain range, a cloud—run on a system Castañeda calls "exponential reciprocity": strike it, and it answers with overwhelming force. The viable moves are stranger. Sit. Observe. Use an ability called "deep listening," or walk across a cloud you've coaxed solid.

The Whitney Biennial gave that system its biggest room. Camoflux was playable in the galleries beside a 360-degree fly-through, and its landscapes derive from abstract Amazon paintings by Maria Thereza Negreiros—Castañeda's grandmother, 96, who sketched hills from a hospital bed in Cali while recalling a childhood in Maués, in the Brazilian Amazon. The guaraná fruit, whose black seed sits in white flesh like an eyeball, became the energy orbs players collect. The wall credit names them both; The Overview's profile has the whole collaboration.

Latino USA's tour of the show frames the bigger picture: Marcela Guerrero is the first Latine to co-curate the Biennial in its 82-year history, alongside Drew Sawyer, and 16 of the 56 artists are Latino. The full exhibition closed Aug. 23—a partial view runs through Oct. 12—but the commission's browser game, Camoflux Recall Grotto, stays free to play on the Whitney's artport: a garden that idles cozily while seeds are scarce and tips into unsustainable overgrowth when they multiply.

We profiled Castañeda in 2021, when Levels and Bosses was already bending Colombian heritage into gaming universes. The Whitney run is that argument at institutional scale: the museum hangs paintings; Castañeda's contribution insists a landscape can look back.

Disclosure: Gameplayarts has Castañeda as a partner.