A new website entitled Monument has gone online based in Newcastle. Two Francisco-based net artists came over to Newcastle thinking there was real documentary film to be made about the city’s cultural history. However, Monument actually shows a selection of creative writing, journalism of an experimental nature, social anthropology about the city combining Newcastle and Gateshead. The two artists, Margaret Crane and Jon Winet, describe the website as offering ‘a portrait of fragmented threads, constantly changing, no two visits are ever the same’. Over a year, they have collected numerous short videos, documenting the remarkable emergence of the city as a revived cultural nexus within Britain. The site is constantly updated, and uses multiple browser windows that give it the semblance of some diffused network, severely dysfunctional. But it works. Given the activity on the Tyne, this is an instance where documentation is instant and not of necessity retrospective. Please visit www.locusplus.org.uk/monument
