← Visual Art

MelonLand is an online community and art project started in 2021. It comprises over three thousand people who enjoy creating things on the web.

Its goal is to promote personal websites, net art and virtual worlds, as a means of building a more human, non-corporate and actively positive internet. It is part of a wider movement sometimes called the Web Revival, that spans many other sites.

This site is intended to be a digital playground, to rediscover the freshness, positivity and openness that the web had in its early years, and to learn how we can make a better web for the future.

Why does this site look like it's from the 90s?

The web in the 90s was experimental, colourful, and full of unknowns - when you think of a 90s website, you're thinking of the aesthetic product of that experimentation. MelonLand is about exploring exactly those qualities too. We try to find the best things the early web had to offer, and apply those things to the modern web, while combining them with new ideas and new perspectives on what technology can become.

MelonLand is not about reviving “the old web”, or encouraging performative nostalgia. MelonLand is about reviving the spirit of experimentation that came with the early web. We do that by exploring its aesthetics and ideas, and seeing how they can be reworked today, while avoiding the mistakes of the early web.

Quotes and References:

Artist Profile: Daniel Murray, by Kristoffer Tjalve (2025-07-29)

Daniel Murray: I've discovered over the years that I have a bad habit of not fitting into any community unless I happen to make the community myself. I thought this was a bad thing, but I described it to someone once, and they said, It means you're a leader. I don’t know about that. I lack a lot of the qualities usually associated with leadership. But to answer your question: MelonLand is made for me, although I’m glad that people come in and participate in it too, and I’m glad they seem to get something out of it.

I try very hard to remember, first and foremost; that it is something I do for myself. Because if I don’t, it’s very hard to justify the realities of cost and the work involved. It has to be something where I feel like this is really, truly something I need to do for myself.

I think with a lot of web stuff, there’s actually an element of selfishness that needs to be inherent within it. It can’t function as, "I’m going to be utterly altruistic and give everything away to everyone for free." You have to start by giving yourself what you need, and from that grows the kind of energy that you can then give to other people.

[...]

There’s one thing I do deliberately: if I reach a point where I look at the page and think, “This reminds me of something,” I stop and I redo it. Because it must not remind me of anything. That’s the aesthetic line I draw. I really don’t want it to feel like something I’ve seen before.

Well, when I say “it doesn’t remind me of anything,” I mean that personally. It’s definitely going to remind other people of things. One of the most common reactions I get is, “Oh, this reminds me of the web in the 1990s.” And I look at them and think, “This is not what the web in the ’90s looked like. You’re having a false memory.” But that’s okay.

Naive Yearly series essay (mythopoetic web)

I manage an online art project and community of webcrafters called MelonLand that started in 2021 as an offshoot of my homepage. Its name was a declaration of independence (this land is your land), and a reference to my first website Project Melon, an art project from 2007 where I photographed a honeydew melon at different scenic locations around Ireland. MelonLand was made to be a living myth, an online theme park that wilfully broke every rule of good web design in a ball of joyful HTML rage.

[Wonders Of Web Weaving podcast with James]

32:36 — [MelonLand is closed on Mondays] because shops close on certain days, or you get a public holiday when everything’s shut, and that makes the day special. Sometimes in annoying ways (I can’t buy food on a Sunday, so I always have to get it on a Saturday) but it creates cultural cohesion.

Culture isn’t made by deliberate action, it’s made by communal experience. Having a day when the forum is closed was also the motivator for switching to Swatch Internet Time. It was a universal thing I knew would annoy everyone, and it’s succeeded.

[...]

You can bypass the Monday lockout on MelonLand if you do code editing, so there’s a sub-community of people who sneak in on Mondays.

They have a club where they chat, and they’ve built all this stuff around trying to break it. Now and then I change things to mess it up for them, and they have to figure it out again. That encourages people to hack, and to build their own spaces within the spaces that have been built for them.