The ‘KlaxAlterian Sequester’ Broadcasts From An Even Darker Timeline (Review)

Ben Beckley & Asa Wember’s KlaxAlterian Sequester has me torn.

From a technical standpoint, it is brilliant in its simplicity, even if the suboptimal WiFi in my apartment interrupted the broadcast more than once. The podplay leverages audio, short video, and, most importantly of all, a series of player instructions that guide the participant through the process of seeing their home through alien eyes.

In the fiction of the piece, you have been sent back in time from sixty years in the future into this (your?) body to intercept a signal from the alien KlaxAlterians who will, by that point in the 21st Century, have conquered Earth. The KlaxAlterians don’t have our conception of spacetime (shades of Arrival) and the human resistance thinks they can get a leg up if they can understand how their enemy thinks. How they see us.

Of course, what’s supposed to be a two-way street of communication breaks down right from the jump, because of (insert technobabble), but co-creator Ben Beckley really sells the whole “I can see you but can’t hear you” bit.

That’s just one layer of the experience. Once you’re nice and (dis)oriented by the resistance story, it’s time to intercept the signal from the Klax. This unfolds as a series of instructions that move around different rooms of your dwelling where you listen to a rather meditative track which instructs you in a few simple actions. There’s a curiosity, even a gentleness, to the Klax’s point of view which raises a point of narrative tension with the strung out vibe of the long suffering resistance. It’s solid storytelling, right down to the bones.

The whole of the experience design is fantastic, with media embedded into mobile web pages that let one shift modalities (listening, moving, watching) in a naturalistic manner. The injunctions to sit, walk, grab cups, etc. give a tangible structure to the perceptual shifts that the meditative tracks reach for. In qualitative, experiential, terms this is exactly the kind of thing I hope for.

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Yet the metatextual nature of the narrative, whose future resistence throughline has a deeply pessimistic bent to it, pushed me out as much as the design drew me in. This dissonance seems to be deliberate, and not just a thoughtless contrasting of tones. No. It’s too precise to be an accident. There’s a skill to creating this kind of friction between tones, and Beckley & Wembler succeed. A little too well at points.

One problem with an hour, give or take, of material with a pause button is that you can pause it. While I was definitely feeling the KlaxAlterian signals, the resistance interrupts just reminded me of how shitty our situation is. Instead of meditating on that and staying inside the fiction I thumb-flicked over to Twitter on Sunday night to catch up with the latest in our entirely non-fictional dystopia. There I watched a real-life resistance unfold a thousand miles away from me in Portland. History makes us a captive audience, with no off switch or pause button. Its plot twists all the more engrossing because there is no ultimate author, just an emergent narrative that we all have varying degrees of agency in.

I thumbed back to KlaxAlterian, the spell a little broken. Perhaps I had picked the wrong night. I’d waited until I thought I was in the right mood for a real podplay, but the metatextual brushes with 2020’s unending trash fire nudged me right back into the downward spiral. It’s not like I can’t lose myself in a narrative, even one that has echos — accidental or otherwise — of our current moment. About an hour before, I’d been enraptured by HBO’s Perry Mason of all things, which had just set course for a plot line about systemic racism on top of a simmering plot hinged on police corruption in 1930’s Los Angeles. Fictional accounts of historical forces that are very much at work in the world right now. Ninety freaking years later.

By tying the fiction of the KlaxAlterian Sequester to the present moment, Beckley & Wembler invite a close reading of their material. Calling the shot like this ratchets up the level of difficulty, making it harder to sustain the illusion of an alternate reality. The contrast in tones between the meditative signal from the Klax and the dissonant broadcasts from the resistance put the KlaxAlterian Sequester in an odd place. The current piece might have been better served by being shorter, with a running time that left less room for the soul to drift back to the here and now. There’s nothing wrong with leaving us wanting a little more, especially when there’s a promise of serialization.

As it stands, the craft on display at every level of the KlaxAlterian Sequester is certainly worth the time. I’d just advise engaging when you’re ready to handle some pessimistic vibes along with the contemplative ones.

KlaxAlterian Sequester is offered as a free experience, donations optional.

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