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Michael’s Eulogy
The television was running through an episode of Seinfeld, not for distraction so much as proof that time still moved. Every attempt at an opening sentence felt counterfeit to the moment it appeared. A polished memory here, a stray anecdote there, each phrase lying flat, like notation waiting for an instrument that never arrived. Occasionally the laptop was set aside for the Notes app on my iPhone, dictating in an attempt to bypass the formality of writing and arrive closer to a flow of thought. This was a eulogy after all, not an essay. The timbre of grief dissolved somewhere between my throat and the microphone. Hours passed in the narrow traffic between devices, drafts and deletion. Evidence of a need to speak, pressing against a form that couldn’t hold it.
The impasse recalls the problem of a musical score. The notation for John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme can be studied, followed, played, but the music itself only emerges in performance. On paper it is structured, in sound it is revelation, unrepeatable and alive. Sentences about Michael felt much the same. Notation without a body gestures towards a memory. But whatever was real about him belonged to a field of experience no text could carry intact. And yet, nothing short of language would satisfy the ritual that demanded it.
Between the need to say something true and the certainty that truth would fracture in transmission, a quiet tension emerges. It was not writer's block, nor a lack of resolve, but the deeper recognition that some realities exceed their available containers. Still, the page and its blinking cursor persisted, insisting expression be attempted. That persistence, half obligation, half desperate hope that a sentence might one day sound like his music, became its own kind of longing that refused to resolve.
The Demand for Coherence
These days, we are asked, above all else, to make sense. Not simply to be, but to become something intelligible. We are told to arrive, to offer up something that is shaped, stable and understood. To name one’s direction, narrate one’s grief, chart one’s growth, and account for one’s expression in ways that confirm legibility. It sounds reasonable enough, as to be able to define and express oneself is a freedom. But when expression arrives within infrastructures that reward clarity and punish ambiguity, there is a particular exhaustion that comes from the pressure to be understood. The demand to be coherent is an economy of self-translation. Are you ready? the world asks, and we answer, yes, always yes.
The institution of coherence is everywhere. In the classroom, a child who hesitates when reading aloud is told to practice fluency. In a job interview, a life is compressed into bullet points of linear progression. A conversation between family and friends encourages us to have answers, to what we want, to how we feel. We are taught clarity is care, and to filter is to withhold. An ontological imperative emerges, that to be known you must be knowable. And so we begin to mistake visibility for truth and value. Félix González-Torres’ Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991) seems to ask something familiar. Two identical clocks, a portrait of González-Torres and his ill partner, Ross Laycock, are mounted side by side, and quietly tick in unison. At first, they appear to perform perfect legibility, both symmetrical, and in harmony. But that harmony turns temporary. As the clocks drive, gradually and inevitably, one clock drifts. What once seemed whole becomes separate, no longer legible in the way it was promised to be. Untitled (Perfect Lovers) withholds the very closure that coherence demands. One clock continues to tick, even as their mechanisms falter. What emerges is not an absence of meaning, but an ontological position that honours non-resolutions as conditions of being.
Rather than a sentimental evasion, a structural proposition emerges. If clarity is upheld as the only acceptable form of expression, then anything still forming, the ambivalent, contradictory and unspeakable, risks being excluded from recognition altogether. This is not merely a social or emotional cost, but an ontological one. It produces a world in which what cannot be resolved cannot be seen, and what cannot be seen is treated as if it doesn’t exist. Jan Verwoert names this pressure explicitly and encounters it through latency as an active mode of being. Latency holds space for the incoherent, not as a lack, but as a necessary refusal to complete too soon and to conform to the performative demand of Western culture for immediacy, coherence and interpretability.
Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance, a term that slips even when it is written, sharpens this point. Meaning, as he suggests, is never fully present. It is always arriving, shaped by traces of what came before and what remains to come. In this form, there is no such thing as complete arrival, only semi-arrival, a kind of ongoing proximity to understanding. We do not speak from a place of completion, but from the movement of proximity. Différance reveals what latency performs, that incompleteness is not a flaw in expression but a condition of it. We can see this in states of being that do not want to be translated. Dense and resistant to simplification, much of contemporary life – grief, trauma, identity, are pressured to be coherent when they exceed the frames available to them. Yet it is within these excesses where the most truthful parts of life reside.
Communal Misfires
There is something strangely clarifying in the image of a supercomputer arriving at the number 42. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought is tasked with solving the greatest mystery of existence: the answer to life, the universe and everything. A crowd gathers, there is anticipation and reverence. After seven and a half million years of computation, it responds plainly, almost tenderly: “42”. This follows a subtle devastation, and as Deep Thought calmly explains that no one ever really knew what the question was. Douglas Adams later explained that the number was chosen for no reason at all. He looked out the window, thought of a small and unremarkable figure, and typed it. In his words, “42 will do”.
What this scene captures is something quiet but enduring about what I have come to call communal misfire. Not a malfunction of intelligence, but a collective attempt to grasp meaning that overshoots its structure. A civilisation gathers in earnest, and constructs an elaborate process to discover the meaning of life, but is met with a technically correct answer that is existentially useless. Perhaps this absurdity points to a condition where even the most sincere efforts to understand are constituted through incompleteness. For Jean-Luc Nancy, this represents a fundamental ontological condition, whereby being is always being-with. There is no self prior to being in relation with another. But being in relation in itself is never complete, because what meets in relation (that is, us) is always unfinished. A community is made of individuals that are shifting, partial, and never fully knowable even to themselves. In this sense, the communal misfire is the most honest expression of what it means to be together: to exist in relation with one another without the guarantee of complete understanding.
The answer “42” devastates because it offers no room for continuation. In a community demanding coherence, it forecloses possibility. And this is where the stakes shift from metaphor to necessity. Epeli Hauʻofa’s Our Sea of Islands emerges from this very threshold, not as a resolution, but a refusal to accept the way others have defined and diminished his world. His writing is the articulation of a world that has already been spoken for. His home – Oceania and the Pacific is rendered as small, dependent and strategically insignificant through the calculative logics of policy and development. Yet, rather than seeking correction within the same logic, Hauʻofa performs a deeper shift by returning the ocean to its relational potential. Oceania does not demand coherence, it moves, circulating stories, kin, resources and memory across a world; a fluid epistemology which refuses boundedness.
This vision is not a metaphorical echo of incompleteness, but its lived modality. In the face of answers that never matched the question, Hauʻofa’s Our Sea of Islands holds space for what exceeds the colonial sentence. It provides being-in-common as always becoming, never final and, perhaps more critically, locates dignity not in clarity but in the ability to remain in motion even after one has been fixed in place. There is a kind of risk in making this connection, of abstracting political and cultural reckoning into a broader meditation on form and failure – of universalising the particular. Yet it is also here, at the junction of ontology, absurdity, and the politics of misrepresentation, we can recognise that a world shaped by incompleteness does not ask for full understanding, it asks us to remain in relation. Because meaning isn’t something we grasp alone, but something we make together in the space between us.
The Saddest Birthday Dinner
The process of developing this curatorial idea mirrored the very conditions it set out to interrogate. If it began with the insufficiency of a eulogy to carry grief, then the project itself emerged from inhabiting that same insufficiency. That is, the inability of form to hold what exceeds it. I found physical curatorial models contracted the project’s conditions by demanding finality where openness was required. Fixing work into exhibition, print or object reduces its potential to live in motion. This was not a result of conceptual failure, but rather the very demand of coherence stood in tension with the indeterminacy itself. That tension became my methodology. What began as frustration through continual delays and refusals gave way to a deeper recognition that the work could only materialise by adopting the rhythm of instability it sought out to explore.
This recognition led to the realisation of The Saddest Birthday Dinner, a digital work in the form of a live lyrical essay that shifts through public rewriting. Visitors may change one sentence, leaving behind a trace that alters the narrative for those who follow. As edits accumulate, the text continuously reconstitutes itself, becoming a mutable composition shaped by the friction of anonymous, yet volatile shared authorship. Realising The Saddest Birthday Dinner as a digital work was structurally essential. Unlike the gallery wall or printed page, the web offers a shifting terrain, one that is generative and inherently relational. It is structurally incoherent, not because it fails to organise information, but because it refuses a stable center. Meaning is always pushed forward, remixed, misread, lost and reassembled. To stage The Saddest Birthday Dinner in this space is to place it inside a system that matches its ethics. This logic extends from the legacy of early internet surf clubs, such as Nasty Nets (2006-2012) or JOGGING (2009-2014), as proto-curatorial platforms where artists engaged not through finished works, but through the process of versioning. Versioning, whereby an ongoing exchange leads to a series of works that evolve over time through a chain of interaction, is core to The Saddest Birthday Dinner. It enacts the very condition it seeks to explore: the instability of expression and the collective negotiation of meaning.
In this way, the work resists completion or fixed duration. Like sediment, its value lies in accumulated layers and will exist indefinitely, in a generative tension between transience and accumulation. Yet, its date of launch does hold significance. The Saddest Birthday Dinner is to launch on my 30th birthday, January 24, 2026. This is not a gesture of personal celebration, but a poetic timestamp and point of origin anchored in a temporal wound. The eulogy that first failed to contain grief now re-emerges, not as a resolved text, but as a system open to interference. The work does not presume an intended user, but insteads waits in openness. In place of dinner I will never be able to share, there is still a table set for any stranger willing to sit.
An Artist’s Method
The Saddest Birthday Dinner emerged from a personal impetus and transformed it into a system others can enter. Only someone entangled in the expressive instability at the heart of the work could create a form that embodies it. Like González-Torres’s Untitled (Perfect Lovers), the work is inseparable from lived experience, not autobiographically, but structurally. The artist’s presence hovers, but does not dictate. Untitled (Perfect Lovers) resists a fixed signature, often titling works are ‘Untitled’ followed by a parenthetical. The Saddest Birthday Dinner enacts a similar logic. I am both foundational and de-centred. The title is the only part of the essay that remains uneditable and constant. It acts as the work's anchor, the last trace of my original meaning before becoming overwritten. It marks a profound shift in the role and responsibility of the artist-curator, where authorship exists not to control, but to be misread and refigured.
This level of embodiment is crucial in the way the project speaks back to the world. The Saddest Birthday Dinner materialises a truth about life that often goes unacknowledged, that is that we do not control how we are understood. Meaning, from our words, to our gestures, to our memories and even to our grief, are always shaped in relation. Différance and being-in-common. You may intend one thing, but another person receives it through their own filters, assumptions, histories and humour. This interpretation too carries weight, and it can overwrite the original, sometimes irreversibly. Communal misfires are not just personal inconveniences, they have social and political consequences across history. The Saddest Birthday Dinner does not aim to resolve these understandings, nor could it. Its impossibility is a core condition. What it stages instead is an awareness, and perhaps then nurtures a humble capacity to remain in relation, even without full recognition. So how does it do this? The project employs four interlocking elements: the lyrical essay as emotional frame, public rewriting as participation, the archive as a quiet ledger and digital architecture as encounter.
As established, The Saddest Birthday Dinner has to begin with something personal, not because it's autobiographical, but because the personal sets the initial tension. It holds weight because it bears the imprint of something lived and unresolved. The lyrical essay offers a structure capacious enough to carry this, because structurally, it is non-linear and fragmented. It resists the constraints of conventional narrative arcs, and instead requires ideas to unfold in digressions and returns. Rather than closing meaning down, it opens it outwards, allowing other voices to enter without breaking the form.
Participation is open-ended and anonymous. Each sentence is rendered as an interactive element that when clicked becomes freely editable by the users. The submitted rewrite is saved to a database and displayed in real time. Changes overwrite the previous line and are irreversible, reshaping the narrative for each visitor who follows. This introduces a deliberate risk. A tender phrase may become absurd, a fragment of grief might be interrupted with humour. But this friction is the point as it directly enacts the tensions of the project – the instability of communication, and the beauty and risk of collective authorship. It recalls Douglas Davis’ The World’s First Collaborative Sentence (1994), which turned the internet into an endless textual canvas. Yet where Davis’s work expanded through accumulation, The Saddest Birthday Dinner contracts and shifts, allowing users to see each sentence being re-written in real time. This transforms the work into a live, unfolding event that offers an embodied witnessing to the instability of meaning. This is, however, intentionally designed to balance intimacy with safety. Moderation is applied where necessary through soft-flagging. This is not to control interpretation, but as an ethical responsibility to protect the conditions of co-presence. To avoid exposing others to harmful content before moderation can occur, the system uses a buffered display, where a writing animation occurs in place of a sentence that is actively being rewritten.
Every edit is time stamped and logged in a private back-end database. Though the front-end shows only the current version, the history of changes is preserved, as well as the work’s original emotional topography. This forms a quiet ledger of communal proximity, tracing how strangers brush up against the work, altering its shape over time. Capturing digital ephemera in this way also honours the instability in the multiplicity, providing a resource for future reflection and creation. Just as Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology preserves unstable and incomplete digital works with the same care given to physical art, The Saddest Birthday Dinner’s archive offers form to edits that would otherwise remain in the liminal, somewhere neither here nor there.
The work is housed within a space to encounter. Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) is foundational for spatial form holds emotional fragmentation via fractured film stills, dialogue boxes and split frames. Inspired by this, The Saddest Birthday Dinner adopts a storytelling form through the spatial structure of a digital book. The site is composed of a front cover, a foreword, a lyrical essay and a back cover. As the user progresses through these sections, the structure becomes symbolically more fragmented. Yet what begins with surface-level clarity, dissolves into a more layered, unstable form, mirroring the thematic arc of the work itself. This shift is symbolic. The lyrical essay is unstable, yet it is held within the framework of a staged book which provides a structural sense of stability, all while embedded within the unstable terrain of the internet. This layered structure becomes a meta-gesture, a direct metaphor for the project's central concern of the impossibility of full meaning (figure 1).
Figure 1. Digital spatial design for The Saddest Birthday Dinner. Please note content is a placeholder. The Saddest Birthday Dinner may appear, at first glance, like a mess. It is unstable in form and openly susceptible to interference. But this is not chaos for its own sake, nor does it romanticise incoherence. Rather it asks: how can we live with incomplete expression and still remain in relation? By creating a system that embraces incompleteness without rejecting connection. The Saddest Birthday Dinner doesn't try to resolve, instead it resists the comfort of closure by remaining open to the presence of others. If it is messy, it is a deliberate mess, a birthday dinner with stages that dissolves into a food fight, and somehow, still holds space for everyone at the table. Jessica Tok |