A Whitney Biennial artwork is a game you play from home

The Whitney Biennial's main run closed on August 23—a partial view stays up through October 12—but one commission didn't come down: Camoflux Recall Grotto, Leo Castañeda's web-based game, lives on artport, the museum's online gallery for internet art, and plays in any browser right now.

You drift through a primordial grotto as an "organic drone," gathering water and sunlight—the game calls them "liquid turbulence" and "electromagnetic intensity"—to feed cyberflora, seedlings that sprout holographic memories of past and future worlds. The pacing is the point: a meditative, cozy loop while the garden is sparse, accelerating only when the organisms multiply beyond sustainability. Progression, the thing games usually worship, is recast as overgrowth.

The landscape draws on the Brazilian Amazon and the South Florida Everglades, and on the Colombian painters Maria Thereza Negreiros (Castañeda's grandmother), Ever Astudillo, and Alfonso Quijano; the build credits Jaime Soto Kure on programming, Victor Gamboa on sound, and Irene Rodríguez on voice, and the game was first prototyped at the Game Jam Lab of Museo La Tertulia in Cali, Colombia.

Another milestone for the exception: Marcela Guerrero co-curated with Drew Sawyer—the first Latina to co-curate the Biennial—and the Latino USA tour that flagged this for us counts 16 of the 56 participants as Latino, reading the whole show as a fight over who gets to define American art. That fight now includes an artist whose native material is the game engine.

We profiled Castañeda in 2024, back when the episodic games and mixed-reality worlds were touring biennials rather than anchoring the country's most argued-over survey. The museum keeps hours; the grotto doesn't.

Leo is a partner of Gameplayarts, but was not consulted on this post.