Leo Castañeda

My work uses principles of sustainability and interdependence to expand interactions and worldbuilding possibilities in video games and gaming communities.

In 2009 I began a series of paintings and performances, Levels & Bosses, exploring digital progression structures through the numerical arrangement of diverse spaces within video games (e.g. Level 1, Level 2, First-Boss, Second-Boss). Mirroring Dadaist exercises of similar outcome, the resulting endeavor led to hundreds of paintings, drawings, Virtual Reality experiences, collages, and interactive sculptures investigating archetypes and environments in gaming genres. Teaching myself video game software Unreal Engine over the following ten years, Levels & Bosses has now evolved into a PC game and transmedia exhibition series, with the first chapter “Camoflux” now previewing at the 2026 Whitney Biennial in New York.

As an online adventure game, Camoflux: Levels & Bosses invites players to follow a cyborg on a neo-primordial journey across timelines to solve environmental puzzles that adapt the aftermath of a cataclysmic implosion. Traversing surreal sci-fi worlds where all landscapes, entities, and technology share sentience, players use a broad range of interdependent abilities such as camouflage, vibrational-touch terraforming, and laser communication to upend traditional archetypes of game “bosses/adversaries'' in adventure genres. For example, the “First-Boss” is the entire Level-One environment, programmed to exponentially reciprocate to player actions: however gently or violently players approach the landscape, the landscape will respond in-kind. Further, Levels & Bosses’ innovative mechanics encourage modulation of intensity within physical controllers to enhance player intimacy with their surroundings.

To advance transformational game play and computer-graphic techniques, Levels & Bosses is created using cutting-edge video game engine, Unreal Engine 5, as well experimental uses of digital sculpting and sound design software. Through strategic experimentation in the game-design pipeline over ten years, I have generated industry-innovating texturing techniques for virtual assets that re-interpret the biodiversity of my family upbringing in Colombia, and the Brazilian Amazon through a continuous loop between analog and digital fine-arts. Select environments created using this method are also optimized for virtual and augmented reality.

Levels & Bosses further explores video game anatomies and social structures through transmedia installations that span interactive gaming furniture, virtual-reality wearables, procedural video projections, and oil paintings designed throughout the video game creation process. Drawing upon Latin American abstraction, 18th century Romantic painting, and the variety of life home to South Florida, Colombia, and the Brazilian Amazon, I render paintings, drawings, and sculptures that become blueprints and textures in digital environments, just as virtual assets become integrated into my physical compositions.

Seamlessly moving between digital and physical spaces, Levels & Bosses applies cutting-edge gaming technology to explore video game archetypes and generate new modes of cultural expression.

About the Artist

Leo Castañeda (b. 1988, Cali, Colombia) is a multimedia artist and video game designer exploring Latin American Surrealism in the digital age. His artwork primarily takes the form of episodic games and immersive installations that meld atmospheric paintings, video, mixed reality, wearables, and sculpture. Castañeda is a Knight Foundation Arts + Technology Fellow, YoungArts Artist Technology Fellow, Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute Praxis Project Fellow, and an Ellies Creator Award, and Harpo Foundation grantee. Castañeda has exhibited at Pérez Art Museum Miami; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel; Museu do Amanhã, Rio de Janeiro; Museo National de Arte Guatemala; Espacio ArtNexus, Bogotá; Locust Projects Miami; Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia Colombia; Bienal de Antioquia y Medellin and the Bienal de Artes Mediales, Santiago, Chile. His work has been featured on PBS, Rhizome, Killscreen, Vice, Hyperallergic, ArtNexus, El Pais, Spike Art Magazine, and New American Paintings. He is currently a resident at the Bakehouse Arts Complex in Miami and part of the 2026 Whitney Biennial in New York.