If you follow me, you most likely know that Alex Mazey is my favourite writer. There are many reasons for this, which I’ll come to; but I’ll begin with explaining that I created the title image of Alex Mazey by using a photograph of him I found on the Internet and asking ChatGPT to help me add some images that are strongly associated with Alex Mazey. The AI didn’t come up with anything sensible, so we went back and forth with each other for some days in order to finally achieve this. If you have a free account on ChatGPT you know why this took a few days. Honestly, I could have made this on my own in an hour, but I’m an artist, so that’s not newsworthy. What is newsworthy is that ChatGPT has a significant environmental footprint driven by high energy consumption alongside substantial water usage for cooling. A single query can consume up to ten times the electricity of a Google search, with daily operations consuming millions of gallons of water. Do you remember reading something similar about Bitcoin, NFTs, meat, and dairy? Well, it’s all true.
Returning to my image; I call it mine because I can’t credit anyone else as I don’t know who took the original photograph of Alex Mazey because I was too scared to ask, as I felt certain he would not give me permission to use it let alone manipulate it into the title image you now see before you. You’ll soon get why I was compelled to co-create this image; firstly to understand the relationship between human creativity and AI by needing an excuse, or better, a valid reason for finally learning how to use ChatGPT; and secondly, to share my visual expression of how I see Alex Mazey within the world. If you’re familiar with his work, you might understand some of what I’m trying to express within the image.
Another thing I stole is the title of this interview “wtf is this shit?” – Which is from Alex Mazey’s Substack post on the day his latest book Rival Streamer was released. While thanking and acknowledging people who helped bring this wonderful project to life, he also wondered if people would value or even understand what he was expressing… I understand its value, of course – and many others do too; but this didn’t stop Alex Mazey from wondering if people would ask themselves such a question. This is the sort of thing that makes me admire him. It’s true that his work might be too conceptual, too niche. He takes risks, and thinks and thinks and thinks about everything within, without, and all around what he is conceptualising. It’s truly magnificent. Truly, I’m obsessed. So, you can imagine my joy when Alex Mazey said yes to an interview with me after I approached him in his Substack comment section to ask. Of course, I immediately went into panic at the thought of failing to keep his attention, or even worse, failing to understand his answers! As you can see, the interview happened, and I’ll let you be the judge of it…
Interview conducted via email during January 2026
Reshma Eyafé: Have you experienced any major changes in any of your core values since your last book, Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition?
Alex Mazey: This is a difficult question for me to answer, partly because I tend to resist making things like core values transparent to people. That’s an ironic thing to admit, I know, because it reveals an anti-transparency – or what I’ve elsewhere termed opacity – something I value in my writing more now than ever before.
What I will say is that there may have been a time in my writing when I wanted to convey things with an aphoristic clarity à la Byung-Chul Han. As time’s gone on, I’ve felt more comfortable with what I’m doing, and less inclined to make perfect sense to people, because I now recognise there’s an impossibility to that approach.
I worry that when authors bring their core values to the forefront of their writing, they succumb to a kind of implicit condemnation that I’m not interested in pursuing. There are plenty of voices willing to condemn the world, and very few willing to follow on from its condemnation. There has to be a life worth living after that.
This doesn’t answer your question, does it?
RE: It’s food for thought and further discussion, which will come later in this interview once I’ve had the chance to process what you’re expressing and perhaps conduct some deeper research too.
For now, let’s give a little clarity to the readers: RIVAL STREAMER // AI SLOP X BRAINROT (IN)FINITITY WARRIORS, or more digestibly, Rival Streamer is your second poetry collection. What style would you call this and does it belong to a genre?
AM: Trickhouse Press describes Rival Streamer as a collection of strikingly original visual poems and an interview between the poet and Alessia Vadacca. I suppose “visual poetry” would be the closest description – much in the same way the ASCII art of Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition was also described to me as visual poetry.
I’ve grown used to being told what my poetry is. People took great delight in telling me what Ghost Lives was and what it wasn’t, and they very rarely felt the need to ask me about it, which came as a relief, because I didn’t know what it was anyway. The term “ASCII” got thrown around a lot, though I suspect that to ASCII purists it was nothing of the sort, given that I made no special effort to stick to characters defined by the ASCII standard.
When it came to Rival Streamer, I kept returning to this lyric from Bladee’s Cold Visions: “In a dark hole with no lights / Trying to make something that counts / Trying to make something I like.” That line captured how I felt throughout the process. I just wanted to make something I liked.
I’d even go so far as to say that the finished collection comes closer to embodying the creative vision I had in my head than anything I’ve worked on previously. I didn’t think too hard about genre in the way I did with the theory-fiction of Sad Boy Aesthetics. I like the idea that readers will tell me what Rival Streamer is when they encounter it – though Trickhouse Press seems confident it has something to do with visual poetry in a post-AI world.
RE: I understand. Well, I have pre-ordered my copy of Rival Streamer and I honestly don’t know what to expect. You have only spoken of the inspiration behind it twice as far as I can see, both times briefly on Substack.
August 8th 2025: “The things that have led up to the creation of this book have been terrifyingly synchronous in the sense that some tiny but nevertheless meaningful moments leading up to its creation aligned in such a way that made these moments feel like they were a part of a much larger emergence.”
January 1st 2026, after a daydream about Jesus: “Perhaps I will write more about this experience one day. Until then, I’ll say that everything that appears in Rival Streamer came after this experience in 2024, with writing accompanied by profound moments of synchronicity that I’ve already written about elsewhere.”
Elsewhere being August 8th 2025, presumably; on the same day that you stated you are more interested in radical opacity than neoliberal transparency. Did you coin the term ‘radical opacity’?
When Rival Streamer is released in a couple of weeks on January 29th 2026, how do you plan on answering the inevitable questions about the inspiration behind the book? Or do you secretly hope for a similar experience to Ghost Lives in that readers might not require your input once they get their own copy.
AM: In a world where we have so many options available to us, it’s difficult to convey how much I appreciate you pre-ordering a copy of my book. I’m very grateful that you’ve done that, and hope it lives up to some kind of expectation. That said, I find it’s best to go into things with no expectation and then come out pleasantly surprised.
I believe ‘radical opacity’ is a term I coined, yes, and whilst I would say I came up with it through my reading of Byung-Chul Han and Jean Baudrillard, I’d say the penny dropped for me when I was writing the essay, Getting #Lainpilled: Towards a Definition of the (Hyper)Eschatological Condition. And so, in truth, the term came to me in combination with reading books on the subject of transparency alongside watching Serial Experiments Lain. I was looking for a way to describe the character Lain Iwakura, who is fascinating to me, and as it turned out, fascinating to other people, because the anime from 1998 has become very popular for the way it adequately portrays a kind of ambient condition that many have become familiar with.
Please forgive the extensive quotation below, but here’s where I use the term opacity in that essay:
“It is within this montaging of suburban Japan, the architecturally significant nonplaces of supermodernity, especially, where the viewer is first introduced to the extradiegetic and aforementioned main title, Duvet by Boa. Situated within those blue hues that recall the artworks of Tsuchiya Koitsu, or perhaps a more tenuous association with the city pop liminality of Hiroshi Nagai, is Lain Iwakura as she turns in motion that resembles a spectral hand having been placed upon her shoulder. It is a motion where those sad and starless eyes that were set upon the urban landscape are now spurred from an instance of quiet contemplation. What’s particularly interesting about Lain is her ambiguity of thought entirely, those moments of mute reflection to which we have no real access. The subtle alterity offered by Lain’s overwhelming equivocation facilitates not only a surface reading as it might relate to a sense of her social alienation but actually places Lain’s thoughts into a distinct category of anti-transparency, opacity.”
You’ll find the word italicised in the essay too. If I was asked to define this, I’d probably say radical opacity is the deliberate refusal of total legibility wherever visibility is taken as a condition of value or truth. I’m not much for definitional explanations in the mode of analytic philosophy because it makes for tremendously dry and boring writing, but I am nevertheless impressed that you picked up on opacity because it’s incredibly important to me as a strategy.
I’ve been quite forthcoming in answering the inevitable questions about the inspiration behind the book, so this will immediately have to end come January 29th. I’m joking, of course, because in truth I’m just really happy that readers are interested enough to ask a question about something as straightforward as influence. Needless to say, there are many influences that went into this book, but I suspect as time goes on, and the questions get closer to wanting me to reveal specific intentionality, I’ll likely become resistant because I think successful art concerns exterior interpretation.
I suppose this falls into secretly hoping for a similar experience to Ghost Lives, although I was a little bit conflicted with how that book was received because I think the collection’s relationship to ASCII art was actually used as a way to end the conversation by way of pinning this categorisation onto it. I got the impression that some readers – and by no means all of them – dismissed the book as serious literature on account of it appealing to the so-called low culture of ASCII art and therefore insulting to the perception of poetry as high art. I don’t know what else I was expecting. What can I say, I shouldn’t bring this on myself and then complain about it.
RE: I knew it! Yes, I picked up on your newly coined term radical opacity because I’m familiar with radical transparency as a concept, and having never heard of radical opacity the term immediately piqued my interest. I don’t use the word opacity in casual conversation but as an artist I do of course use it in technical application both in literature and visuals. However, to have it shifted in context and positioned in contrast to the supposed positivity associated with the culture of transparency creates issues for me.
I believe you’re coming from a place of creative obscurity and the economy of language; certainly you have the literary dexterity to pull it off – but some readers may not see how prefixing the term “opacity” with “radical” can serve to create a comfort and satisfaction with what is essentially secrecy. Having expressed that, I ask for your feedback and corrections, as well as your blessing to add that I also believe the adjacent conversations around the right to privacy give birth to the opportunity for radical opacity to become a culture of its own.
Speaking of which; visually, you have managed to mostly avoid sharing your physical likeness with the Internet, apart from an out of focus graduate feature published by your alma mater in 2019, and a dark image captured by photographer Mihai Bircu at a Bad Betty Live Event in 2024. Something tells me publicity headshots are not due to be released – but I need a title image for this piece. For me, please, can you make time to use found images online to create visuals of you and me in joyful cyber conversation about ‘Poetics in 2026’ (a conversation we have not actually had) to serve as a real-time insight to your technical processes in partnership with artificial intelligence, please?
AM: It’s definitely not a word I use in casual conversation either, and it’s certainly the kind of word I use in a theoretical context to explain a kind of strategy or position. Radical opacity takes influence from Baudrillard, of course, but perhaps a more widely accepted, literary point of departure can be traced back to the Chinese Misty Poets of the twentieth century. I suspect that’s the kind of influence that falls outside of the usual pop-cultural references readers expect from me, but Bei Dao is perhaps the most important literary figure for me when it comes to writing poetry. There are other poets, of course, but the Misty Poets’ obscurantism is obviously very important to me, and is reflected in those strategies deployed against a system Byung-Chul Han theorised in The Transparency Society.
I had another great interview recently that landed in very similar territory to that of questions around transparency, and so when it comes to transparency, I’m also very keen to use the conception of transparency that Baudrillard discussed in an interview with Truls Lie, published in 2007, titled The Art of Disappearing, where he said:
“I’m not talking about transparency in the sense that you see everything on television, but that television is watching you. It is all about reversibility, in the worst sense. It is about visibility, the total disappearance of secrecy. Everything has to be visible, not in a panoptical way where everything is visible to the naked eye. Transparency is more than just visibility, it is devoid of secrets. It is not just transparent to others, but also to the self. There is no longer any ontologically secret substance. I perceive this to be nihilism rather than postmodernism.”
Perhaps this also approaches an answer to the part of your question that deals with secrecy. With this said, I wonder if I’ve merely named something that was — and still is — emerging as a matter of reversal, rather than something I’ve personally created that will go on to become a culture of its own. I suspect that’s why I used something like an antonym of transparency when it came to naming opacity. I think I prefixed the term radical to demonstrate how opacity was fast becoming an intentional strategy deployed inside a culture of transparency, although I have also used the term opacity on its own.
There’s a scattering of images and videos of me out there, as you mention, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to avoid rendering my physical likeness transparent to the internet. It is nevertheless something I will keep resisting, and it is for this reason that I won’t be feeding any found images into artificial intelligence, I’m afraid. There are a few reasons for this, but I suspect the one most relevant to this discussion is the one that knows it would serve as no insight into my technical processes, because I don’t give AI real pictures of things or people. That’s something I’ve never done. There’s also the fact that I’ve not revisited my use of generative artificial intelligence since Rival Streamer was finished and sent to Trickhouse Press. I think this is for the best right now — and I was even quietly content when the AI Literary Review was discontinued on 4 December 2025.
RE: I’m thrilled to inform you that I’ve just received my pre-ordered copy of Rival Streamer, and I’ve started taking it all in. It’s so beautiful, so clever, so funny, so brilliant; really well done – great job! Also, reading your wonderful interview with Alessia Vadacca (featured at the end of Rival Streamer) has redirected my line of questioning in the most positive way. My next question was going to be around the AI Literary Review, in hope of tricking you into a semblance of transparency around the publication briefs that gave birth to such complex creativity as Rival Streamer. Now, I have the information I need to bring about a different sort of clarity for myself and hopefully for other future consumers of your work. I am compelled to do this.
Thank you again for your thoughtful responses to my questions so far. I truly appreciate your time and points of reference. With a clearer understanding of your thoughts on “reversal” – I would love to go deeper into this concept, please. Do you believe obscurantism can resist the cycle of reversal? If yes, how (tangibly)? And are there any noteworthy differences between obscurantism and radical opacity (in practice)? I believe there are – and I will include my thoughts on this in my conclusion of this interview. Speaking of which; your refusal to provide me with an AI generated image for the cover has brought me a step closer in understanding a few more of your objectives and processes with Rival Streamer and beyond (past and present). Thanks… this is brilliant.
AM: From an aesthetic standpoint, I feel like it’s incredibly difficult to create something sincerely considered beautiful. These are certainly words that are good to see associated with the book, and it’s very kind of you to share them with me here, just as it’s been very kind of you to ask me these equally thoughtful questions. I’m also glad the interview with Alessia Vadacca clarified some things too — that’s reassuring. There’s a lot going on in that interview, I feel, but it’s certainly a moment in the book that invites readers to revisit the poems, whilst taking into consideration what’s discussed there.
Beyond this, I’m looking forward to reading your own thoughts in regards to the noteworthy differences between obscurantism and radical opacity in practice. I suspect that will be helpful for me because ultimately I’m still circling the conceptual difficulties around this idea, so your input is very much appreciated. For Baudrillard, reversibility is the process by which systems collapse under the weight of their own success, so the visibility granted by transparency collapses into nihilism by way of there no longer being anything left to see. I think Baudrillard was perhaps blinkered by his own melancholy here, and didn’t pursue his own logic of extremes far enough so as to reveal the real irony of transparency, that would be something like opacity emerging as its reversible shadow.
It’s perhaps important to clarify that opacity, in the way I understand it, does not resist the cycle of reversal so much as it intensifies it. In a society where transparency is compulsory and visibility is moralised, opacity functions as a seductive intensification that doesn’t track with this idea that visibility will lead to truth. For me, transparency has become less about leading us to disclosable truths than disappearing what there is to see. And so it is not about reintroducing something that ‘hides’ from these systems (in the manner of resisting them) than it is introducing the very idea that there exists something ineffable they will never find nor categorise. Seen this way, I think obscurantism has more to do with hiding something, so in the case of the Misty Poets, what was hidden in their obscurantism can be reduced to something like political criticism. That’s not to disregard or belittle that as a strategy, since it could be argued that obscurantism worked in multipolarity to bring about democratic reforms, but I don’t know if Lain Iwakura can be understood in the same way. As such, Lain exemplifies opacity for me in the way she evokes ineffability in what is nominally read as a techno-nihilistic world and it is that which makes me feel like there is still so much that we cannot account for, that must be disappeared by those systems of transparency in order for the lifeworld as we currently perceive it to continue unchallenged.
I wonder sometimes if this ineffability is something that will be retroactively understood, and so it makes me think about time and causality and those revelations from the future that may one day make sense of this all. Perhaps I’m just being melancholic here too, because I worry that we’re so painfully ingrained in hegemonic ways of seeing the world that retroactive understanding is all I can ever hope for. You’ll have to excuse me for quoting from my own book here, but to borrow a few lines from Rival Streamer: ‘I am interested in talking to the future / but sometimes / you’re / just stuck / where you are.’
RE: The Trick to Life – a fantastic opener and somehow also a perfect ending. Throughout this interview, I have mostly agreed with you, once I manage to find my own clarity within your theories. I hope to be part of many future conversations ignited by your words. Thank you so so so so much for your time and effort in answering my questions and for bearing with me while I worked my way through the concepts you put forward; here, in your books, essays, and in your Substack – where it’s all happening all the time!
Conclusion: I eventually convinced Alex Mazey to send me a glimpse into his creative process for Rival Streamer, and this is what I received:
I considered asking Alex Mazey to talk me through the images then realised that would be a mistake. Instead, I opted to study the image names:
Stage1_Familiar Troublemaker
Stage2_GPT-4-turbo’s Rendition of Familiar Troublemaker
Stage3_Solo Laner_Alex Mazey
Make of this what you will. At least, until you have your own copy of Rival Streamer. For now…
Obscurantism as I understand it creates a divide between those who know and those who do not; which is in many ways a form of elitism. For example, doctors and lawyers use a language that makes it difficult to understand what they are saying, even when speaking directly to us. This is part of an industry-wide agreement to maintain their value in society as well as their exclusivity.
Radical Opacity on the other hand, and perhaps an entirely different human body, appears to my mind as being similar to a divine covering… a covering designed to protect a sacredness of the experience of something.
Therefore, I’m seeing these two actions through the intentions of the actor; one is concealing and the other is protecting.
Lastly, I’m certain that cultural vibes can only be understood in real time; understood by all of our senses as well as our sensibilities. To imagine a future looking back at us with a better understanding than we have of ourselves doesn’t feel true to me. I have thought a lot about retrospectivity and I sincerely believe we can make absolute sense of the now, precisely because of theorists like Alex Mazey, guiding us through different ways of thinking. Alex Mazey fans are all part of his amazing journey, and like I said on X – I’m certain this makes Alex Mazey a whole culture – I’m certain of this! Any writer who dedicates as much time and effort into breaking barriers of judgement and encouraging cultural empathy as Alex Mazey, deserves at the very least for you to read his new book.
RIVAL STREAMER // AI SLOP X BRAINROT (IN)FINITITY WARRIORS is out now – and you can buy it here.
Article by Reshma Eyafé
Reshma Eyafé is a Conceptual Artist living in Scotland, with roots in Nigeria and India. She was born in England and has done a bunch of stuff.
Alex Mazey won the Roy Fisher Prize from Keele University in 2018 and a Creative Future Writers’ Award in 2019. A contributing researcher on sociology and postmodern theory for the international academic journal Baudrillard Now, he is also the author of Living in Disneyland (2020) and Sad Boy Aesthetics (2021). Alex’s debut poetry collection, Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition, was published in 2024 by the award-winning Bad Betty Press. In 2025, Alex won the Judge’s Prize in the Magma Poetry Competition, and was made a full scholarship recipient of The New Centre for Research & Practice. In 2026, his second poetry collection, Rival Streamer, was published by Trickhouse Press.
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