Electric Myths

This piece is part of our series with Naive Yearly, a conference on the odd, quiet, and poetic web. Read Kristoffer Tjalve’s foreword to the series here.

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The first upload to my homepage (melonking.net) in 2016 was a story about a goat who trades his ears for an iPad, but recovers them again when he realises that the iPad can be broken in two, and remade into cyborg ears that fuse the best of what he had lost and what he had gained.

The story itself is a reference to a local myth about Loch Hyne, a tidal lake in West Cork, Ireland. After my parents split up in 2006, my dad bought a house near this lake, and we would sometimes canoe to an island on it for picnics. At the island's far shore and surrounded by a wall of brambles were the ruins of a small castle that had overgrown into a mound of ivy. It was an abandoned place, though supposedly the mythological home of a King who had donkey’s ears.

It’s a myth that appears in various forms across Europe. It goes: Each year the King would summon a local boy to cut his hair - and then kill the boy when he discovered the King’s secret (that he had donkey ears). This continued until one year, as the latest boy lay dying on the ground, he whispered the secret to the grass. The grass then whispered it to the trees, and the trees to the birds, and pretty soon everyone knew.

Since the 1920s, Loch Hyne has been a focus for biologists because it contains rare sea creatures (various urchins, sponges, and mollusks). Around 75% of all marine life is represented in the lake, some of which is rarely seen elsewhere in Northern Europe. The arrival of these creatures began around 2000 BC, with rising sea levels connecting the lake to the Atlantic.

It's possible that some creatures arrived clinging to the undersides of boats sailing up from the African coast. Like the iPads of their day, Bronze Age traders provided connections that were as culturally seismic then as the internet would be thousands of years later. These connections brought knowledge and life, along with all the dangers and benefits that go with those things.

Today, our societies are still growing in the valleys of melting glaciers, and we have become very good at making the rate of that melt increase. For Loch Hyne, life is now in decline, intensive farming and popularity with water sports have led to areas of the lake becoming dead, poisoned by fertilisers and sunscreen runoff.

For my own part, I cant say I have much right to judge, I was a blow-in too, and the popularisation of that lake is a success. It has supported businesses, healthy sports have been encouraged, skincare has been observed, and the only cost has been some, mostly unseen, arguably invasive, sea life.

Like stories, you can gather life into a series of expressions and impressions. Life is a beating waveform on an oscilloscope and a Simple Minds cassette playing from a car stereo on a rainy beach. As for myself, coming from a confused mix of Irish and English families, I’ve always felt like an invasive sea creature. I don’t know if I’m the King or the boy being murdered, or both, and I wonder if the boy or the King knew the difference either.

Like life, the web is a series of expressions and impressions. As we surf the web we become Bronze Age traders, passing from port to port. We surf to create ourselves and we create the web by surfing. We are the sea creatures, but we are also the day trippers, as the web cascades its environmental and social ripples around the world.

If you zoom out a little more, the web becomes the surface of the earth, with valleys and hills, expressing and depressing with the tide. Wrapped in a halo of satellites, like starry fairies that fill the night with ego and self-reflection.

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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.

This project has oscillated over the years between moods and styles and goals. Today it’s primarily known as a hub for homepage enthusiasts, a dream of reimagined ’90s Web Revival design and a resource for budding webcrafters, artists, and game designers.

MelonLand has an unexpected folk hero called Ozwomp, who first appeared as a childlike traveler in one of my short games (Ozwomp is Arriving) in 2020. The game was about the feeling of uncertainty and alienation of waiting for someone in an airport. However, Ozwomp has come to represent a free spirit — a boundless, unworried, imperfect doughnut, who perhaps hides somewhere at the centre of the universe, but also, in the links between people and the places they would like to be.

In my time crafting on the web, I’ve come to understand that the websites have limited meaning on their own, what matters are the links between them. The web exists in its links, not in its pages.

Links are the substance of myths, and they are the world between worlds. They exist in the dark matter that is all around us. Links have no time; for links, everything is anywhere, and they exist in totality, even when their destination has abandoned them. Links are where your memories live when you forget them, and links are where wishes are made and destroyed each day. They are your first kiss and your last day on earth. Links are every moment that isn’t now and everywhere you’ve never been. If there is any point or task for art on the web, it’s to guide you home, through webs of links when you’ve lost your way.

After the Naive Yearly talks, I made my way to Italy by bus, and spent two weeks lost in museums of dead things and streets of living things. Flowing through cities as a tourist and walking down corridors and ancient exhibits is like being inside a link, where the world is decorated with street GIFs, natural mp3 files, and layers of volcanic content.

The mythopoetic web exists in the ease of slacking off amongst these layers of time and media. It lives in the lakes of the past, the quiet cafes, the museum at closing time, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford (Derek Mahon), the excitement of discovery, the obliteration of loss, and the people who remind you that you’re okay, and you’re welcome, and the room for reinvention and play is boundless.

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When computing first emerged in the 1840s, with the work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, it was part of a strange fusion of poetics and the scientific method, which Ada coined as “poetical science.” The Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and like a wildfire it was in the process of reshaping all life on earth. Like all revolutions it had a counterpoint, the Romantic Movement, which was an artistic counterculture that arose in contrast to many of the values of industrialism. Ada’s father, Lord Byron, was one of the key figures of Romanticism; Ada’s life and work existed at the crossing point of industrial science and the romantic ideals of love and the sublime. 

A hundred years later, many of Romanticism’s ideas were adopted by the counterculture movements of the 1960s, such as the Beatniks and the Hippies, as they worked to dismantle the social constructs of that era, and set the stage for the 21st century to begin. 

Likewise, the early web incorporated many counterculture ideas as it spread across universities and post-hippie America in the mid-1990s. Like Ada’s work, the web was born out of a merger of scientific tools and counterculture mythopoetics, a cascade effect that is still playing out today.

To me, this highlights that the fusion of myth and technology has always been present in computing, and I take some comfort in knowing that we are not the bottom feeders of Silicon Valley’s outsized grip on the world. There is no conflict of interest between poetry and the web, or between industrial products and the human soul. We have always defined each other and we always will.

I think about that fusion, as I search for used PalmPilots on eBay; those clunky dot-matrix icons of yuppie aspirations are beautiful, both as industrial poems and silicon myths. They tip tap their way through my heart, and as I look out my window at the twinkling city lights and hear a drunk lady shout “Echo! Echo!” in the rain, I realise both the PalmPilot and myself are like Pandora opening the box, like Tom Hanks escaping his island in Castaway, and like The Lady of Shallot. Going to the window is the riskiest thing you can do, because it’s the world out there.

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In 2024 I created a collective website called Everyone. It can be simultaneously edited by every MelonLand member in a melting pot fusion of each skill, mistake, and idea the community has to offer. One link you may find on the Everyone site takes you to the bonfire, a crackling GIF with an invite for people to rest for a while.

As you sit by the light of your monitor and think back on the places you’ve been, strange forest folk emerge from the ether and bring objects to sustain the flames.

dotmidi brings sticks, and leaves, and potatoes to bake 

Commodorn contributes nothing but his presence 

LIA brings pumpkin seeds 

kuro brings s’mores 

levya brings a book of “mad libs and other word games” 

Mayflower brings a lithium battery 

A memory brings the drinks 

13BECC brings copper sulphate to turn the flames green 

Kallistero brings a tiny planet on a stick

glitterpigeon brings pinecones 

as others still hide in the trees. 

As people come and go, inconvenience is counterculture, and life is very inconvenient. Like flowers and bowers and tigers on the mountain, and skulls in the sky, and badly written poems, and forgotten AngelFire URLs, we will gather in the supermarket at the end of the world, in awe of the Kellogg’s cornflakes and the Amazon Basics rechargeable batteries. As The Coneheads play in every cinema, and I slow dance to Wednesday’s “I am the Cosmos”, alone in my hotel room the night before this talk. Everything is the web, everyone has a website, and everything is cool forever. Will you go? I believe in you, you can do it, I love you, I didn’t say that.

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As a teenager, I visited a fairy fort (a Neolithic stone circle) and had some time to kill. So I sat there for a while, thinking clichéd thoughts about wanting to fall in love. When I got up to leave, I left a key from my pocket as an offering in the hope that the fairies might grant my wish. Later that day we visited some distant family friends, and while driving up, I spotted a mysterious girl in the back of their car, who seemed to glow like glass in the sun. I fell in love at first sight, and I still believe in love at first sight because of that moment, although it was years ago, and I’ve hardly seen her since.

Maybe it was a coincidence and I had deluded myself into finding what I wanted to find, but there’s a certain comfort in believing I was the butt of some fairy joke. However, in all the years and the loves that came after, I’ve come to learn that what was granted was more than I’d wished for. Love is not a possession, and that experience was a lesson in learning to be lost in the magic of others, and in moments, and in spaces, as they fade in and out of life.

I enjoy stories, with their neat outcomes and expectations, but life has an exhausting habit of continuing after the credits roll. The web on the other hand is more like an eternal credits screen for a film that never started and never ends. Still, if you can end your battles, and smile when you're the butt of the joke, and believe in wonder when you know better – then you’re doing okay.

I think of the musicians standing on the stage at Woodstock ‘69, looking out into the night at half a million people holding candles in the rain.

Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright […] mellowed to that tender light; Which heaven to gaudy day denies. — Byron 

As webcrafters, we are folk singers and candles, PalmPilots and Bronze Age traders, we are monarchs and heartbreaks, and cats snoozing in sunny ruins. We are links and the destroyers of links, as we are lives and the destroyers of lives. It’s no secret that the web’s impact on life in the 21st century has been one part terrible and one part wonderful. It’s that contrast that gives the web its vibrancy, and it highlights the seriousness of working to make the web a kind and glittering playground for humanity.