That the exclusionary meaning of the word index, in the sense of an instrument of censorship, can never be excluded, even in the most efficient file management, is illustrated amply by the computer art installation, "The File Room" (1994) by Antonio Muntadas, which indexes cases of governmentally suppressed speech from classical Greek drama to contemporary journalism. It includes works censored throughout the history of art because of their sexual orientation content, and directly addresses freedom of speech; when the project opened in Chicago in May 1994, it contained 400 cases spanning 25 centuries, from Aristophanes to Salman Rushdie. Viewers could ponder Diego Rivera’s dispute with the Rockefeller Center over his depiction of Lenin, or TV moderator Ed Sullivan’s request to The Doors to change one line of their lyrics in "Light My Fire." The architectural refinement of the installation belies the immense amount of information compressed into its representation of censorship; in its dark chambers of bureaucratic compartmentalization, containing black file cabinets and low lamps, viewers browse case histories – or indeed add their own case to the archive. Chicago high school students reported the confiscation of pamphlets about teen sexuality; entries were also made possible via the Internet. Hypertextual case management allowed the integration of images and other data from the Internet into the "The File Room" – hundreds of users logged on daily and explored notorious or half-forgotten incursions into private or public lives. Thus "The File Room" earned its reputation as pioneering net art. But while such computer-mediated extension seems to explode the frame of the project, the installation remained site-specific in another sense: Muntadas had chosen the Cultural Center in Chicago because it had originally been built as a city library in 1897. Foregrounding the precarious and unfinished nature of archival processes, "The File Room" attempts a re-integration of the exclusions of the archive into the institution that has been shaped by censorship as much as by preservation. In the final analysis, "The File Room" can never be closed, its promise to render invisible images and make unreadable texts legible must remain in permanent deferral. By the same token, with the inclusion of formerly censored art and literature now widely available online, the specificity of Muntadas’ hypertext project is in peril of paling into the grand nowhere of the Internet, an unremarked irony for an art installation which despite (or because) of the intentionally claustrophobic atmosphere of its physical setting sought to transcend certain limitations of time and space.