video capture from The Forest
2008
21 minutes
In earlier days of the Internet, websites sometimes included a “guestbook” page for visitors to leave their mark. Emoticons could be inserted into these posts by typing certain combinations of characters. For instance, : followed by ) becomes 🙂 — a smiley graphic.
This video is a screen capture of a guestbook whose code was lightly modified to include small photographs in addition to the standard emoticons. Crucially, anti-SPAM protections were completely removed, resulting in a massive flood of bot posts. All of the writing here was produced by automated, uninvited SPAM bots whose origins will probably always remain a mystery to me.