This is how it began, with a forkbomb.. In 2001, Ade encouraged me to enter the Transmediale software art award, that he’d won the year before. I ended up submitting this:
my $strength = $ARGV[0] + 1;
while (not fork) {
exit unless --$strength;
print 0;
twist: while (fork) {
exit unless --$strength;
print 1;
}
}
goto 'twist' if --$strength;
It basically creates a process that keeps duplicating itself, while printing out zeros and ones, creating patterns from a system under heavy load. It won (half) the prize, and ended up being part of the touring Generator exhibition curated by Geoff Cox and Tom Trevor, alongside Adrian’s auto-illustrator and work by other pretty amazing artists.
I’ve been co-curating the Thinking Out Loud exhibition at the Open Data Institute, and we’ve ended up including it in a couple of different forms.. A print of the original forkbomb output that appeared on the Generator exhibition guide, the (now rather scruffy) fanfold paper output that was printed during that exhibition, and a new print showing outputs from a range of different computers and operating systems contributed by some brave people (download PDF).
The original script, including some background and instructions for running it, is here.
