Bunker for a Tropical Pixel by Lucas Albuquerque
How to Read a Digital Tropical Tree
In the framework of the “Post-natural and Other Ecologies” residency, offered in 2025 by the Museum of Tomorrow, the program expanded its international reach through a partnership with IMPAKT (Netherlands) and Gluon (Belgium), institutions whose mission is to strengthen the discussion on art, culture, and technology through interaction between European and Latin American organizations. Following a public call for proposals aimed at artists from Latin America, the jury—composed of representatives from the three partners, as well as the curatorial team and an external expert, Domenica Cox—selected the project “Bunker for a tropical pixel,” submitted by the Colombian artist duo Tatyana Zambrano (1982, Medellín, Colombia) and Hernán Rodríguez (1998, Medellín, Colombia).
With an interest in constructing digital worlds, their work explores the cultural forms taken by virtual products (such as video games, films, memes, and advertising), seeking to understand how such elements are shaped by discursive structures and aesthetic choices that both reproduce and mold the collective imagination regarding Latin America. Addressing issues such as the poor image, kitsch, DIY, agribusiness, electronic exploitation, and the virtuality of subalternized bodies, the duo’s work materializes in the creation of complex and interactive environments, permeated by narratives shaped by a Latin American experience. By exploring the riches and gaps of these geopolitical borders—both physical and digital—these elements serve as a backdrop for post-natural speculations about symbiotic worlds, where the fake, the simulacrum, and the organic are no longer distinguishable; instead, they make room for experiences woven from listening to the noises and languages of living and non-living beings, transformed into a single machine (or software) in their artistic propositions.
As part of the Museum of Tomorrow residency, the selected project delves into the creation of a brand-new digital game, “Bunker For a Tropical Pixel.” Envisioned as a cosmos where the concepts of tropicality and virtuality collide, the world—comprising three levels and a main character in an evolutionary state—required field research. Interested in native vegetation, the cultural customs developed by traditional Brazilian communities, and local and foreign productions about the country’s tropical biome, the curators, biologists, ecologists, and digital producers, during their time on-site, facilitated a series of conversations and exchanges about the formation of the idea of Brazilian nature—which is, in part, native and, in part, constructed. It was also an opportunity to meet other artists whose investigations find echoes in the work of Zambrano and Rodríguez.
In addition to the work, which will be presented in the following text as well as in the duo’s contribution in the coming pages of this publication, the residency facilitated a workshop in which the group discussed the concept of nature and tropicality in video games. Building on a field activity and subsequent in-class development, the group began imagining post-natural biomes, born from the interaction between nature and culture, taking the local vegetation of Guanabara Bay as a starting point. Some of the plants created that day—which incorporated elements such as human-plant-machine cooperation, visual morphisms, narratives of origin and survival in inhospitable environments, etc.—were incorporated into the game’s final version. In this sense, the residency’s greatest contribution was to propose a project whose construction takes place collectively, not only through the labor that brings it to life, but also in the minds that dream it.
In Bunker for a Tropical Pixel, the plot unfolds in a post-tropical setting where the extinction of sunlight forces living beings to adopt new survival strategies based on algorithmic bioluminescence. The player takes the form of a bio-bacterium, a light-conducting parasite, in an adventure that spans three worlds, conceptualized based on the RGB spectrum (red, green, and blue). Each level offers symbolic layers that make up this universe—beginning in the green world, through the swamps, whose biome mirrors the Yucatan cenotes; continuing to the resort of artificiality and energy extraction proposed by the blue level, which examines tools for data transport and raw material extraction in the oceans; and concludes in the sensual red environment, created from the observation of pollinator ecosystems. Within them, the user must connect with spiritual energies, plant specimens, and traces of memories, obtained through meditative puzzles offered at the end of each stage’s exploratory experience. The narrative offers a glimpse into the tropics, where the fusion of the organic and the digital culminates in the generation of artificial light, necessary to sustain life in an ecosystem that breathes electricity and memory.
The player takes control of an extremophile, an organism capable of living in environments with extreme physical and chemical conditions, commonly found in volcanoes, the ocean’s abyssal zones, areas contaminated by radiation or toxic waste, and the upper atmosphere. Photosynthetic, these beings can generate their own food, energy, and UV radiation, while retaining the ability to interact with and absorb the physical and spiritual lights present in the environment. As protectors of their biomes, they possess the ability to generate and store electricity to keep the surroundings alive and energized; in this sense, the bacterium reverses the relationship between habitat and inhabitant, parasite and host, inviting the player to navigate—and save—the post-human world in which Bunker is set. The character, however, exhibits another characteristic as the game progresses: it is a complex and ever-changing being, capable of adapting and evolving according to the needs imposed by the environment: while in dense forests its legs allow for agile movement, the aquatic zone requires gills; the hive, on the other hand, favors flying insects; the extremophile, in response, acquires such abilities through contact with local life forms. Such condition offers the player a dynamic experience, providing gameplay that changes in each world.
Bunker is a hybrid movie-game and standalone interactive installation, designed to run locally on a PC without requiring a constant internet connection. In an immersive cycle of approximately 60 minutes, the game mechanics oscillate between cinematic sequences and the solving of meditative puzzles, in which the player must manage the symbiotic network, making decisions about the ecosystemic balance between biobacteria and technobacteria. Distributed via the project’s website (bunkerforatropicalpixel.com), concerns regarding digital accessibility led to the creation of a free, open-source release model tailored for different audiences.
A tropical dome in the middle of civilization
A crucial experience for the conception of Bunker took place in 2022, during Zambrano’s visit to Tropical Island, an aquatic and eco-friendly resort that simulates tropical forests, including their living biomes and the cultures of the peoples who inhabit them. Amid turnstiles and signage for the “wild experience,” the information banner reads:
A fascinating world full of exciting discoveries awaits you!
Countless breathtaking themed worlds are ready to be explored. Attractions include the world’s largest indoor rainforest, featuring exotic pheasants, flamingos, and butterflies, as well as stunning indoor and outdoor water parks and authentic Balinese and Thai architecture. The South Sea feeling, fun, thrills, and plenty of action are guaranteed.”
(Available to read at https://www.tropical-islands.de/en/entdecke-die-tropen/unsere-attraktionen/tropical-world-gebiete).
Billing itself as Europe’s largest tropical resort, spanning approximately 100,000 square meters (about 25 acres), the park recreates the climatic conditions of the places it references, such as the rainforest, whose entrance features a simple indigenous hut, built in a rudimentary style to evoke the indigenous peoples who inhabit these forests:
Embark on an exciting expedition through the world’s largest indoor rainforest, featuring approximately 50,000 plants and 600 species. The mangrove swamp is home to animals such as turtles, dragonfish, flamingos, and pheasants.” (Available to read at https://www.tropical-islands.de/en/unsere-attraktionen/tropical-world-gebiete/tropischer-regenwald).
The Tropical Village, another park within the aquatic complex, is meticulously designed to resemble a small village, featuring structures from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. Although these simulations integrate a fragmented and multifaceted landscape of biomes, civilizations, and cultures rendered in two-dimensional symbols—devoid of complexity and history—the transparent plastic film roof and steel structures echo the idea of a capsule that cages nature and tames the wild. They offer visitors the guarantee of safety and, consequently, uncompromising fun, detached from contact with others and from the impacts resulting from the exploitative use of nature. It takes on a function: entertaining.
If artificial environments like this serve as a reflection on the way nature surrounds us, it is due to the caricatural element to which it lends itself, capable of highlighting characteristics inherent to the very conception of what we call natural and nature. Precisely because it reveals itself as an artificial, fake park, the park summons its other, its antonym: what does it consider true, real nature? Could human action strip nature of its aura of authenticity, making it the result of a symbiosis between nature and culture? If so, at what level and in which cultures, considering their beliefs and activities? Is untouched nature merely a symbolic construct, erected in defense of its other, domesticated counterpart—the landscape?
On the borderline between the real and the artificial, the game brings another type of architecture into the discussion: the bunker—more specifically, ecological bunkers. Capable of being conceived symbolically only in a historical era when the looming end of the world becomes a genuine concern, such projects serve to create a repository or backup of the ecological diversity of certain regions of the world. It is the case of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world’s most famous seed vault, located between the North Pole and mainland Norway. Also called the “doomsday vault,” this public fund was entirely financed by Norwegian funds. Its mission, as stated on the website, is:
“We offer secure, free, long-term storage for seed duplicates from all germplasm banks and nations participating in the global community’s joint effort to secure the future of the world’s food supply. The facility serves a humanitarian purpose and is part of the international system for the conservation of plant genetic diversity, guided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Although the Global Seed Vault may play an important role in the event of a global catastrophe, its value lies primarily in providing a contingency plan for individual collections in case the original samples and their duplicates in conventional germplasm banks are lost due to natural disasters, human conflicts, policy changes, mismanagement, or any other circumstances” (Available to read at https://www.seedvault.no/about/purpose-operations-and-organisation/#%3Cstrong%3Eprotecting-maximum-amount-of-plants-of-importance-to-humanity%3C/strong%3E).
Serving as a repository for other seed banks around the world, the SGSV acts as a master repository, safeguarding copies and even the genes of its extensive collection—which, in March 2026, already numbered 1,378,238 samples. Information regarding the procedures to be adopted in the event of a global crisis is unclear and insufficient, but the answers to the most common questions assure that “Norway owns the facilities, but the depositors own the seeds. No one has access to the seeds except the depositor.” Although depositors are assured of the custody of their items, ownership of the institution is exclusively reserved for a single country.
Digital Taxonomy in the Post-tropics
“Trees send us messages about the things we need to know” (2025, p. 285), says British navigator Tristan Gooley. According to the author, trees are capable of conveying information about the soil, water, people, animals, climate, and weather, as well as serving as a guide for navigation in dense forests, which, at first glance, seem to offer no orientation cues to those who venture into them. By transposing the act of listening to more-than-human ways of life and how they communicate in their own language, how can we identify and read the messages communicated by trees and digital biomes, which seem so harmless and secondary in the construction of virtual worlds? First and foremost, we must consider how their non-organic nature shapes their formation, as well as the message they convey to the player.
With the consolidation of video games as a highly profitable industry, many of the objects that make up the game environments are replicated from databases of three-dimensional components, known as stock libraries: this is the case with environmental elements such as televisions, furniture, animals, and, of course, plants. These catalogs of digital readymades—these digital libraries—have been developed both historically and in recent times by various leading companies, such as SpeedTree, Xfrog, and Laubwerk, which distribute these models to the architecture, film, and digital gaming industries. What reasons justify the decision to outsource the production of these items? Researcher Alenda Y. Chang reveals: “Trees, in particular, still require a great deal of computational power from most computers to render, so from the perspective of computer graphics or game development, it is often necessary to sacrifice precision or detail in favor of speed and efficiency. (...) A second, but related, problem concerns the difference between node-and-edge models (for trees, nodes, and edges)—which we are familiar with in computer network diagrams—and models that add layers of volumetric and visual detail. (...) A final concern is the relationship between individual plants and landscapes, whether interactions within a population, between species, or between vegetation and terrain, or between vegetation and environmental conditions, such as light and humidity.” (2020, pp. 116–118). Produced to simulate plants without reflecting their complexity, these models compose the environments and blend in, becoming simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, designed to be seen and ignored.
Provided according to local biomes and the cultural imagery that permeates them, these digital plants allow the programmer to construct a world from mass-produced clichés. This is the case with native tropical plants, such as palm and banana trees, which evoke the idea of untamed nature. Historically perceived at times as bearers of an ambiguous image, at times as a virgin Garden of Eden, fertile and rich in biodiversity; at times as a torrid, primitive, inhospitable, and pestilent zone, the tropics have consistently been a dream of consumption, conquest, and desire. Despite their differences, however, both images served to strip indigenous peoples of their autonomy and technological brilliance. Beginning in the Enlightenment period, authors such as Georges-Louis Leclerc and Charles-Louis de Secondat associated the tropical climate with disorder and volatility; later, Pierre Gourou, in *Les Pays Tropicaux* (1947), defended the idea that great civilizations could only thrive culturally and politically in temperate climates, and that any civilizational development found in tropical countries would have to be imported from elsewhere—in a staunch defense of colonial processes.
It is against this backdrop that the poet, playwright, and political essayist Aimé Césaire highlights, in Discourse on Colonialism (1950), how the mechanism for constructing the idea of tropicality, based on the scientistic foundations of the time, converts the logic of exportation into ecology, turning blood into data. As a countercolonial strategy and with the aim of dismantling the cultural and aesthetic significance of coloniality, Césaire founded, together with René Ménil, Lucie Thésée, and Aristide Maugée, the journal Trópicos, which ran from 1941 to 1945. An important critical movement for bringing together texts of Black consciousness and reflection on colonial processes, the journal became an incubator for the significant concept of tropicalité, developed from Caribbean intellectual currents, as an imagistic form that sought to subvert and reverse colonial logic. Drawing on the lessons of his native Martinique, Césaire “was interested in how a colonial/tropical periphery, marginalized by the temperate/imperial center, could nevertheless subvert this relationship and thus pave the way for different forms of knowledge—a counter-tropicality” (2023, p. 5).
In a post-pandemic era, in which such colonial and xenophobic perceptions have been exacerbated by myths surrounding the origin and spread of the virus linked to the Global South, it is not surprising that these ideas still persist in popular culture—particularly in the context of digital games, which are often overlooked in media studies. It is within the context of a critique of the elements of a purported neo-digital-colonial tropicality that Bunker For a Tropical Pixel immerses the player in an interactive, open, and meditative experience, created from a Latin American understanding according to which body, nature, and elements are part of the same organism.
In an exercise in autopoiesis, the duo presents us with a world inhabited by complex life systems—half organic, half inorganic—set in a scenario that only materializes through the climate crisis caused by the extractivist systems that enable it. In a dystopian future whose language we already speak, Bunker invites us to recall and revive ways of life that, though adapted to climate chaos, have left only traces on the horizon and must be recovered by the extremophile so that it may continue its adaptive journey. It is through fiction that the duo weaves questions about the relationship between consumption and disposal, production models, energy acceleration, and the deafening silence regarding other forms of life. Zambrano and Rodríguez are part of a complex cultural context, which game critic Marijam Did effectively summarizes: “Currently, almost all video game devices are manufactured under conditions bordering on slavery in the Global South, from deadly mineral mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to deplorable conditions in hardware factories such as Foxconn and Riteng in East Asia. The manufacturing of this hardware also contributes significantly to climate change. (...) To imagine a new kind of politics in video games and in the ways they are marketed, perceived, and critiqued, we must first reflect on the modes of game production.” (2024, p. 8).
Amid feelings of excitement and apprehension, Bunker is, above all, a political game; in the sense that it creates an experience of counter-tropicality, drawing on Aimé Césaire’s writings as the backdrop for this assertion. While rejecting a denialist understanding of our climatic, cultural, and political state, the duo does not, however, embrace a restorative dream of a world whose impacts have been erased. Instead, they choose to work with the tools that remain, combined with others—mechanical, cosmic, and at times alien to those who have never seen them—to glimpse possible tropical worlds, born of a brotherly, familiar dream, and no less strange for it. It is precisely this strangeness that allows warnings and images to echo from digital RGB reality into our own, summoning us to adopt a critical stance toward our means of consumption—material, in the ecological sense, but primarily cultural—regarding who produces the images that reach us and what their hidden interests are.
Glossarium for a post-tropical Bunker
These are the parasites, aptly named from the Greek word meaning 'to eat at another's table', which they do in a ruthless manner. Unable to make their own food, parasites steal from unwilling organisms called (perhaps facetiously) hosts. Many parasites penetrate the host plant's tissues with a special structure called a haustorium. In fungal parasites, the haustorium is an extension of the mycelium. The effects of parasitism range from mild disruption of the host's metabolism to its untimely death. [...]
Death of a host results in death of the parasite; but by then, the interloper has reproduced and its seeds have been spread to the other victims.
Capon, Botany for Gardeners, p. 136-137.
Digital control of color television monitors—in particular, via frame buffers—has added precise control of a large subset of human colorspace to the capabilities of computer graphics. This subset is the gamut of colors spanned by the red, green, and blue (RGB) electron guns exciting their respective phosphors. It is called the RGB monitor gamut. Full-blown color theory is a quite complex subject involving physics, psychology, and physiology, but restriction to the RGB monitor gamut simplifies matters substantially. It is linear, for example, and admits to familiar spatial representations.
Smith, Alvy. (1978). Color Gamut Transform Pairs. p. 12-19
The ‘tropical’ is not the ‘exotic,’ but rather this total experience. The idea of a Brazilian nature ready for consumption is a construct that prevents us from achieving true objectivity. We need to devour this external image and build something that is, at the same time, environment and body.”
OITICICA, Hélio. Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto. p. 108
When I call it body-territory, I am imploding this idea of nature as something that is ‘out there,’ a fenced-in garden. The nature that the colonizer describes is a still life, quantified. (...) My practice seeks to reclaim nature as a mystery that refuses to be mapped.
Brasileiro, Castiel Vitorino. Estratégias de Transmutação, p. 32.
Post-nature is also a starting point for challenging the notion that nature has to do with the beauty of things, thereby fostering a form of critical thinking rooted in obscure ecologies and new post-Romantic aesthetics. The idealized conception of the natural through concepts such as beauty or the sublime—that harmonious or immense and paralyzing aesthetic experience—is no longer valid for thinking about the worlds to come.
Alonso, Gabriel; Benito, Clara. La Condición Postnatural. p. 18.
Artificial Gardens – as Lamb describes them – now strike us as not at all artificial, since they have been made ‘natural’ by time.
Finlay, More Detached Sentences on Gardening. See also Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay, p. 40.
Thought must not interfere with the gesture; the silence outside must meet the silence within so that the work may appear.
Ohtake, Tomie. Tomie Ohtake, p. 124.
The term ‘ecology’was coined by the German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel, in 1866 to describe the ‘economies’of living forms. The theoretical practice of ecology consists, by and large, of the construction of models of the interaction of living systems with their environment (includng other living systems).
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Ecology’.
The New Ecology (..) also aims to overcome the human/nature divide and tackle the issue of sustaining ecological functioning in the face of a growing human domination of the Earth, in a new epoch that has accordingly been called the Anthropocene. Ecological science is assuming a leading role to help guide the growing human enterprise, to support the need and wants of a burgeoning human population, without jeopardizing nature's ecological functions that support humanity's needs and wants.
Schmitz, The New Ecology, 10
As J. Sakai points out in his radical pamphlet The Green Nazi, this history of fascist and extreme nationalist politics 'pushes us to check out what words like "Green", "Nature" "ecology" and "peasant" mean in our politics (...) It's not about the past, it's about the future.' We might also want to add to that list of words important gardening terms and practices like 'organic' and 'biody-namic, shaded as they are in their origins by a Nazi stamp. If this kind of approach seems to be 'entering environmentalism from way on the other side', as Sakai describes it, it is also a reminder that radical is by no means essentially progressive-that radical gardening can be sobering, unliberating, can be a mask or a lie, can justify or lead to the xenophobic the murderous and even genocidal.
McKay, Radical Gardening, 69.
To choose smartly the name of a geologic epoch requires us to ask an additional question, that is, why should we, or, in the case of an already chosen name described above, why did we choose a particular name? My favorite example that illustrates the importance of asking this subsequent question comes from the scholarship of feminist historian of science Londa Schiebinger in her prizewinning book Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (1993), in which she asks the question, why are mammals called mammals? Throughout the book, Schiebinger shows that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European social and political struggles influenced taxonomy and physical anthropology. Thus, natural historians of that time created a peculiar and enduring vision of nature that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of the time period. Schiebinger's chapter on the choice by renowned taxonomist Carl Linnaeus to name warm-blooded, hairy animals 'Mammalia', even though mammae are not a pronounced unifying characteristic of this group, relates to my argument. As Schiebinger points out, milk-producing mammae function only in half of these animals (the females), and only then for part of the time when they are lactating. Schiebinger reasons that Linnaeus could have chosen hair, three ear bones, or a four-cham-bered heart-ungulates, sloths, bats, sea cows, humans, and apes share these characteristics—as the defining feature of this group, but instead he made the female mammae the icon of the group. In doing so, he paved the way for thinking about females solely in terms of sexuality and underscored eighteenth-cen-tury women's position as nurturing caretakers.
Schneiderman, The Anthropocene Controversy, p. 175.
Squares was the logical thing to do. Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility (...) but we used squares. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.
Russell Kirsch, interview with Science News, 2010.
To become invisible one has to become smaller or equal to one pixel.
Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File (2013)
The technosphere is the set of technical and technological objects that humans have built and installed on the planet. This sphere of artificial, constructed matter may soon surpass the mass of all living beings on Earth.
Fabio Escarano, Diálogos Regenerativos para Futuros Sustentáveis, p. 84.
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