The Snake Has Run Out of Tail to Eat

Reels slide on a vertical screen next to Valerio Volpato, it mirrors his actual phone, which is sitting on his desk. As he scrolls, the reels’ sounds feed into Volpato’s mixing board, generating feedback loops he distorts through his knobs and pedals. Another algorithm of sorts. We are all sitting on the ground in front of him at 10 documents, a research center and exhibition space founded by Ginevra Ludovici and Flavio Michele in Monteverde, Rome. Volpato scrolls, he spent months training his Instagram algo to surface the most wretched of the reels. Someone is filletting and cooking a clown fish. A CapCut shows Berlusconi and Putin’s loving friendship. An AI video portrays pope Leo urging users to like and comment “Amen” in order to be healed of their illnesses.Low quality 3D characters and blocky scenes follow in a nonsensical sequence: “You solved the lemonade man’s riddle. You concluded that finding baby cream requires you to ascend Mount Dice and confront God. Halfway up the mountain, you discover a lonely cabin buried in the snow, inside lives the mountain man. He welcomes you in, then, very calmly, he asks whether you will tickle him.” 

The next scroll shows us a young man. He’s recording himself with a phone propped over his bed to frame his headrest, no lights except from his phone’s flash. He’s showing us a spartan shelf he built out of two planks of wood, to host a small alarm clock and an almost-empty plastic water bottle. He says: “Salve a tutti, vi volevo fare vedere che sopra il mio letto mi sono creato un portaoggetti con due tavole di legno.” [Hello everyone, I wanted to show you that over my bed I made myself an object stand with two planks of wood]. Monotone speech, no punctuation, the feed stalls on him. Sounds like he hasn’t spoken to anyone in a while. It loops for far too long. Audio aggregates, and Volpato distorts it further at every repetition, turning the performance into a glitchy pseudo-noise concert. We’re sliding into madness and isolation along with the boy. His voice sounds like an echo of itself. Finally, Volpato scrolls away.

When the performance ends, I chat with the neighbor who sat next to me, older, not someone I picture as an avid scroller. She found the video of the boy with the planks of wood most disturbing. Untethered from reality altogether. Jarring. Years ago she wrote a hopeful poem that someone read as cosmically depressing. Her words belonged to whoever read them. The boy’s intentions were completely colonised by the feed, Volpato’s distortions, by our reading. My generation has quit mourning the death of truth. As Al-Sweel and Elwan point out in a recent conversation on Spike, it’s been a decade since “post-truth” became word of the year. Consensus online is that 2016 was the last good year. In these 10 years, psychosis became normalised. Covid isolation was the last rites. 

Gen-zers do not know of a pre-truth world. They never had to kill it. Kane Parsons’ Backrooms is only the latest cultural flash of the capitalist illusion glitching out of control. In the film, post-retailpocalypse liminal spaces expand and mutate according to the characters’ subjective memories. When asked by Jimmy Fallon what would be the scariest thing to see in his own rooms, Parsons replied: “Complete nothing.” Fallon follows up: “If you got lost in the backrooms, what’s your escape strategy?” Parsons goes: “Make peace with it. Don’t give yourself hope. It’s the wise thing to do. Look inwards.” What if we let the poor boy be? We should be past diagnostic hunger, at this point. The surface was always the real. Sontag knew it. Excavating meaning sets us back. A choral release from the belief in truth. The dissolution of a shared reality has long been established as a fact —get it? Reality is what our own mind manifests. Disembodied delusions, or “Consensual hallucination.”

My algo fed me Pope Leo introducing his encyclical letter Magnifica Humanitas. He warned against the loss of faith in truth. Truth is God, and vice versa. “Modern man is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself.” Scanning the text cmd+F “truth” yielded 69 results. One line begged for a second take: “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.” The algo optimises. It cannot be redeemed like a person can. Who would it confess to? Herein lies the epistemology of human vs machine, per the Holy See. 

Nietzsche shrugged. 

Under penalty of eternal damnation, the scrupulous compulsively seek to amend their errors. There is only one right way to pray. On christian subreddits, users suffering from religious OCD support each other through their moral perfectionism, chronic doubt and intolerance of uncertainty.[1]  Epistemic crisis = hell? They’re unable to tolerate the uncertainty of a perceived wrongness within themselves and will frantically scan scriptures and theological debates to determine whether they fall within, or without, the arbitrary parameters of “sin”. And not all sins are created equal… They argue too.As one redditor puts it: “God starts looking like an abusive father. We submit out of fear not love. […] Of course we will rebel.” 

They have a point, and yet they return. Belief has curdled and now only the ritual persists. Faith outlasted by compulsion, prayers that soothed their moral anxiety now entrench them deeper and deeper. The body continues genuflecting after god has left it. “Salvation that edges and never arrives.” There is no wrong way to pray because the algo accepts everything. It’s an infinitely-permissive God who never judges. Sin. Is there a right way to pray?

Communion. The algo knows us better than our own selves. Uncannily precedes our desires, or extracts them from our subconscious. Baudrillardian seduction inverted, desire distilled from our own data. We feed the feed, it feeds us back. Cannibalized and shat out by the egregoric machine. No-input mixing the collective unconscious. Leo can’t have us misplacing our belief, but our abrahamic God was always an egregor. 

Was the algorithm trained to disturb or were we watching a portrait of Volpato’s psyche?

Volpato has spoken of his own struggles with OCD and intrusive thoughts, albeit not of a religious nature. [2] These led him to distrust his perception, his impulses and ethics. He found solace by interfering with reality, submitting to its unpredictability rather than correcting it. Externalising his twitches. Noise music. The glitch made flesh. Where the scrupulous tirelessly excavate the scriptures for stable ground, Volpato surrenders to the surface instead. In there is no wrong way to pray, the surface is rippled rather than pierced; the egregor is revealed. We stray further away from God’s light every day. 

The boy cannot shake off the trappings of post-truth. Entombed by his own algo, in his dwelling, with his shelf, his alarm clock, his almost-empty water bottle. His isolation crystallised, consumed, appropriated without his knowing. Content fodder. A part of Volpato’s curated descent into “the most Wretched of the Screen.” The same feed that showed him to us is tightening its loop around him, deepening the cell. Voluntary immurement. Anchorite rites already given. But he seems to have made peace with it.

[1] See posts under r/TrueChristian, r/excatholic, r/AskAChristian, r/Deconstruction.
[2] In a publication published by 10 documents for this performance: Gineva Ludovici, Flavio Michele in conversation with Valerio Volapto, there is no wrong way to pray, 10 documents, Rome, May 2026.

10 documents launched its first Public Research Program in November 2025. The first cycle, On Affection, is dedicated to affection as a field of theoretical and political inquiry. Not as a psychological category but a relational device. That which moves bodies, shapes communities, redefines critical thought. Objects, conversations, sonic and performative acts conceived by artists and researchers working across disciplinary boundaries. Each event becomes part of a collective lexicon articulated through presence. There is no Wrong Way to Pray was presented within this cycle on May 29, 2026. A small booklet by the same title, with a conversation between Volpato, Ginevra Ludovici, and Flavio Michele, was published on the occasion.

Valerio Volpato’s practice moves across painting, sculpture, performance, and sound without settling into any single discipline. He paints almost exclusively in black, gesturally and fast. Keeping rational thought from interfering with what surfaces. The memory of fear is his medium. More recently he has been applying aerospace and automotive materials to objects that don’t require them. Carbon fiber and kevlar on animal enclosures and cages. Deliberate short circuits. His sound practice is declaredly undisciplined, with a reverence for unpredictability. Absence of rules as organizing principle. Like riding a powerful machine without fully controlling it.