The File Room was conceived as a response to both personal and public events. In 1988, I was commissioned to produce TVE: Premier Intento, a work for the Metropolis program on Spanish public television, which examined the television network itself. Without explanation it was never broadcast and I began, given the meaning and intention of this commission, to think, interrogate and address issues of censorship. In the last several years, the cultural situation in the USA has been clouded by a political and social context in which many cases and circumstances of censorship have been enacted, in both thought and action. In several instances works (images, texts, sounds) have been removed from the public domain. The File Room was conceived under these circumstances, and maintains a continuity with my preceding works which have addressed issues of representation and the exercise of power in society. Randolph Street Gallery approached me in 1991 to present a work in Chicago, and through a series of discussions and my interest in developing a new work on censorship, the possibilty for the production of The File Room appeared. Through a lengthy and interesting process (too complex to describe here), we developed a large network of individuals, collectives and organizations without whom this project could never have been realized. The involvement of RSG, a non-profit alternative space, and especially Exhibitions Director Paul Brenner has been fundamental in the evolutionary process, creation, and maintenance of the project. An important scope of the project is to demonstrate an historical, world-wide and cross-cultural perspective on censorship. Given the intentions and scope of The File Room it could not have been conceived of as a closed project, but from the beginning has been designed to be accessible and interactive so as to stay as open and fluid as possible. New technologies (such as the World Wide Web) have begun to provide possibilities for interactivity in a way that creates a network of awareness and dialogue necessary to the success of projects such as The File Room. It is becoming clear that projects involving new technologies require the invention of creative and organic structures for the development and production of new work, collective structures which are closer to those used in film or architecture than those which artists may be used to working within. Considerations of interactivity, openness, and art as a social tool have been integral to the project from the beginning. Through the development and realization of The File Room, many questions have also been raised regarding new technology in the areas of censorship, artistic authorship, access, language, translation, control and activation. All of these have come to be a crucial aspect and consequences of the project and its proposition. From its inception as an artist's project, The File Room was intended as an instigator of thought, discussion, and participation. As a computer archive, running on the World Wide Web, The File Room echos the many "established" information resources which once only found their place in a physical location (e.g. a library, an archive, an office) but have now become accessible from anywhere in the world via the Internet. As a public installation, The File Room has taken many forms depending on the situation in which it is presented. As a large scale, room-sized installation at the Chicago Cultural Center in summer 1994, it reflected on the history of the renovated Cultural Center building which for 80 years had been the main branch of the Chicago Public Library. The installation gave the project a sense of physical presence among the more traditional visual arts being presented in adjacent galleries. In such a setting, stand alone computer terminals would have confused the visiting public as to the nature of the project which is a work of cultural production rather than a definitive informaton source such as is usually presented in a computer kiosk. The File Room was never intended as an encyclopedia, rather an area for dialogue. Other presentations of The File Room (such as that in MedienBiennale 94 in Leipzig, Germany and Ars Electronica 95 in Linz, Austria) have relied on the model of a terminal presentation, demonstrating the potential which exists in public, kiosk-type Internet access to take one around the world from a cafe chair or exhibition hall. Within these art contexts, despite the absence of a physical "art installation", there was no doubt about The File Room's intentions as an artist's project. This presentation in ICC's Virtual Museum follows this model. --Muntadas, October 1995