Muntadas’ "The File Room" is clearly indebted to the conceptual works of the Art & Language collective, particularly to card index systems such as Index 01 (1972), consisting of eight tall file cabinets of variable dimensions (appearing like columns topped with drawers) and photostats; Index 2 (1972), consisting of a similar installation and surrounded by a wallpaper of index cards, plus file boxes on a table; and Index 5 (1973), offering “Instructions for reading the index”. While net art may disregard the modernist ideal of the artist who originates or perfects a single skill or style, it still differs from conceptual art in that it often suffers a separation of interface and content; projects such as the I/O/D Webstalker (1997) strive to make that gap of digital representation the main theme. Full comprehension of the influence new technologies have on literature and literary studies in particular, and on our culture and its self-representation in general, may seem to recede perpetually into the distance. But while popular views of distance remain cathected with forgetting and repression, distance is arguably nothing but the medium of appearing – as long as simultaneity equals noise, distortion, incomprehensibility, the delays and processing cycles of human or machine intelligence remain necessary. Information lies dormant until it is accessed through an interface; yet that same interface may be distorting the information, obscure its sources, and perhaps even its crucial processes. This kind of information hiding is at work in every machine, and in the recesses of the very code that carries hypertext; it is what database art tries to tease out and foreground.