Alex McLean's forkbomb won the transmediale software art award in 2002. Unlike a virus, forkbomb is not contagious, it's just destructive. A forkbomb is a program which when executed on a computer repeatedly creates new processes using the fork() system call. As new processes are generated, the resources of the system are quickly used up and the computer crashes. This particular forkbomb prints a series of zeroes and ones out on the screen as it crashes the computer, providing a visual representation of the state of the machine in the act of freezing.

Like biennale.py, this piece is primarily a conceptual one. All that is there is the code and its potential. We are afraid to execute the script but at the same time fascinated and tempted by it.