CULTIVATING A VIRTUAL GARDEN: LEO CASTAÑEDA'S NEW INTERACTIVE DIGITAL WORK
Inspired by the Amazon rainforest and the Florida Everglades, the project commissioned for the 2026 Whitney Biennial invites players to explore the interconnections between natural ecosystems and technological systems.
The Whitney Museum of American Art launched Camoflux Recall Grotto, a digital art project by Leo Castañeda commissioned for Whitney Biennial 2026, and available on artport, the Museum’s online gallery space for Internet art.
Camoflux Recall Grotto is a web-based game that invites players to cultivate a garden within its surreal, primordial landscape. The game’s environment draws inspiration from the Brazilian Amazon rainforest and the Everglades in South Florida, as well as works by Colombian artists Maria Thereza Negreiros, Ever Astudillo, and Alfonso Quijano. Blending organic and technical infrastructures, the game’s virtual grotto offers a space to examine processes of growth in a technology-driven ecosystem.
As players enter the game, they assume the role of an organic drone hovering above water in a shadowed grotto. Players navigate through the otherworldly landscape, collecting water and sunlight resources to nourish the “cyberflora” organisms. Holographic memories from past and future worlds emerge from the cyberflora as they sprout, intertwining natural ecosystems and computational networks within a shared environment, revealing the relationality and tension that exists. With Camoflux Recall Grotto, Castañeda challenges conventional game patterns of rapid, continual progression. The game’s tempo fluctuates in an unpredictable way, slowing to a calm, meditative cycle when seeds are sparse, then accelerating when seedlings multiply beyond sustainability.
“It’s so meaningful to work with the team to bring to life the surreal landscapes I grew up with and spark reflection on relationship between mechanical, biological and collective memory,” said artist Leo Castañeda.
Through its shifting rhythm and responsive environment, Camoflux Recall Grotto reimagines cultivation as a feedback system rather than an experience of cumulative progression. Growth unfolds from reciprocal exchanges between the player’s interactions and the game’s framework, foregrounding the ways balance, adaptation, and response are influenced by the systems they occur within. By placing ecological and technological processes in dialogue, Castañeda reflects on the intertwined infrastructures that increasingly organize contemporary life.
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