Daniel Murray, or more commonly known as Melon/Melonking on the internet, is an indipendent internet web artist from Ireland. He is prominant in the Indieweb movement, and has many projects. However, Melon (as I will be calling him) I believe is a modern day surealism artist.
Melonking has created many projects, ranging from stories, digital art (2d and 3d), and even games, and almost all of them carry a theme of being very dreamlike.
An exmaple is his small online game, Ozwomp Online. The game is fairly simple, the player playing as one of a few characters composed of geometric simple 3d shapes. However the entire game does have a very sureal and almost dreamlike quality to it. There is no blatently clear objective and the space is popualted by many unrelated pbjects such as CD cases floating in the space and various abstract islands. The centerpiece is in fact a gaint Ozwomp.
Another exmaple of this is his game Ozwomp is Ariving. This game is a modern adaptation and interpretation of Theater of the Absurd, and also carries a simialr dreamlike qualoty to it that Ozwomp.online does. Melonking says on his game page that "Ozwomp is Arriving is about the uncertainty and weirdness of the world - of half remembered things and lost moments; and waiting for the unknown future." showing the continuous theme of uncertanty, unreality, and well, surealism!
In addition, Melonking's websites, including his own personal site, his forum, commmunity site, and others, all carry an abstract and nostalgicc qualioty to them. All of the sites utiilize spacious webdeisgn- desnging websites to have a more phsycial and spaceial feel, for exmaple having a page with a background of a room and graphics of real world pbjects. His main page has a lot of this, and also has many interacrive experinces on it.
And to conclude the evidence, his own online persona is an example of surealism art. He goes by Melooon, Melon, or Melonking on the internet, and that is no cooincdence. There is actually a story behind it that he explains somewhat on his website:
"I got my first laptop in 2007, that summer we went on holiday; there were supposed to be some other kids coming, but things didn't work out and I was the only non-adult there for the whole 2 weeks, also there was totally no internet, so all I had were the pre-installed applications on my laptop, a camera and a whole lot of time!
As a "protest" I pretended that I was like Tom Hanks in castaway with his football friend, but instead of a football I found a melon in the shopping basket and used that! I took the melon all around that summer and photographed it, and when I found iWeb on my laptop I was super excited and decided to make a website for the melon. It was called Project Melon, and also there was a mysterious club called Club Melon you could join if you knew the password, there was also a blog, called Melon Times.
- Melon
This shows a common theme in surealism: applying a different or more complex meaning to a seemingly normal object. This is exempliofied when you compare it to the famous surealism art peice, The Treachery of Images by René Magritte. The painting applies a different meaning to a pipe- an ordienaru pbject- in the same way Daniel applies it to the melon
Name: The Melon
Source: Melon History
Name:Ozwomp is Arriving
Source: Downloads Page
Name: The Puzzling Goldfish
Artist: Bruce Rolff
Made in: April 2013
Analysis:
Source: Purchace Listing Page
