Trapped

Between Neurally Rendered Synthetic Data and The Illusion of Escape

So you are Trapped in a Big Box Plaza. You, like the denizens of Faust’s Hamlet “still love” you “still live” in your condo overlooking the 37,000 acre big box plaza, this overlit lobby of eschatology where “we shall die dancing in each other’s arms.”

The plaza has everything you need except for aesthetic beauty or grace, though there is some sense of those things on the treelined horizon, where nature is klept—as best the big box plaza is culpable of keeping it—at bay.

Your condo overlooks The Booster Juice; The Shopper’s; The Planet Fitness; The Massage Addict; The Liquor Control Board of Ontario; The Cineplex where you can see how Robert Zemeckis de-ages Tom Hanks and face swaps Robin Wright Penn in a ‘film’ conspicuously titled HERE, a Remonstrance of Things Past post-produced and ghost-induced by a Visionary company claiming to offer “Limitless Creativity” “Temporal Consistency” and “Latent Space Manipulation,” a company called, in what can only be understood as mockery, Metaphysic.

Other than eating popcorn slathered in what’s not butter or even Becel but recycled deep fryer oil while passively viewing Neurally Rendered Synthetic Data, the next best leisure activity has to be Trapped, “a distinguished member of the continuously growing escape room network across North America” […] “Nestled conveniently at the lively crossroads of Cundles Road East and Lions Gate Blvd” one of the plaza’s eight competing Escape Rooms. And while you were already Trapped in a big box, this Midnight Arcade has all the trappings of a Medieval Prison Below the Sphinx, offering some illusive sense you might escape from the Ricœurant horror of Memory, History, and Forgetting though you know you cannot, not really now not anymore.