▓ Changeling

In Viktor Dedek's audiovisual installation Changeling, this simply conceived tunnel is transformed into a labyrinth. The narrative, heard from a radio receiver, meanders between fragments of memories and reflections, linked together by the narrator's voice. But is it really just one voice? The shifting perspectives and intertextual references (Dedek incorporates quotes from William Gibson's famous cyberpunk novel Neuromancer into his text in several places) seem to suggest that there are actually multiple voices speaking here. It is as if several "selves" are speaking in parallel.

In his work, Viktor Dedek constantly explores the experience of the video game players. However, he is not interested in their aesthetics (although he sometimes works with them as a formal element of his works); his focus is on gaming itself as a specific activity, or rather, as a kind of existential space. The analysis of the player's experience and behavior thus offers him the opportunity to explore the conditions and processes of the formation of the "self." For him, the ideal medium for such existential reflection are games in which the player has the opportunity to model their own character. Dedek distinguishes between two types of characters and thus two types of players: Characters with clearly defined characteristics, which may change in intensity during the course of the game (the player gradually increases the level of their character's pre-selected characteristics), but remain the same in their basic dimensions, and shape-shifting characters, i.e., characters that temporarily take on the characteristics of other characters, thereby radically changing their own essence.

These two types of characters correspond to two types of gaming experiences. Gradually building a character with predefined characteristics leads the player to identify with the character, or rather to dissolve the player's "self" into the character's "self." At a certain point, the player stops playing the game and, in Dedek's words, the game begins to play the player. This is normal, unreflective gaming, which serves as entertainment and offers the opportunity to realize versions of one's own "self" that are impossible in real life. However, Dedek is interested in the character of the changeling (shapeshifter). The constant changes in characteristics immediately disrupt any moment of identification with the character. The player does not build the personality of their character because their character has no unified personality. Rather, the personality of their character consists of its constant changes. In this sense, Dedek works with the ambiguous metaphor of wax. For him, wax is both a material that takes on ever new shapes as its temperature changes and a combustible substance that nourishes the player's mind in its transformations. Wax, or more precisely a certain type of wax, also ensures the player's connection to the game world (Dedek's Gibsonian player uses wax to ensure the connectivity of sensors attached to his head).

But where, then, lies the constantly sought-after "human boundary"? The changeling permanently changes its shape—shape shifts—and thus ultimately has no boundaries. Nevertheless, something like a boundary does exist here. It is the boundary of the player's reflected experience, which is concentrated in the experience of the reflecting "I." Such an "I" does not have clearly defined edges, but it does have a center. I reflect, therefore I am, and I am the one who reflects. Another boundary in Dedek's installation leads somewhere between the world of objective reality and the world of virtual reality. However, this boundary has a specific form: rather than a barrier, in his conception it is a kind of membrane, permeable in both directions. It separates, but it also connects. A boundary in the sense of a border crossing. In Dedek's work, the changelings of the game world also inhabit the real world. The changing concept of "I" applies both here and there. However, in order to be recognized as objective in reality, it first had to be seen and experienced in the reality of the game. Such a "human border" therefore takes the form of a connective wax that enables this transition. And the one who crosses is the reflected "I"—the shapeshifter. Ultimately, therefore, there is only one border. The center is a boundary, and the boundary is a transition, which is also a boundary and a center at the same time. And so it goes on and on in a never-ending cycle of self-reflection, from which ever new "selves" of ever new changers arise.