We've recently been playing with Open Frameworks (our first test project will show up in a blog post very soon) which is a C++ library that aims to provide people with some of the power available from a low-level programming language, while lowering the bar for entry. There's a small but ever expanding group of people making beautiful things with code, using similar tools to Open Frameworks.  I've always found this kind of work inspiring - it's a great way for beginners with creative leanings to get into code. Here's a little rundown of some of the tools you can use and some of the work that's inspired me: Adobe Flash - at one time Flash seemed to be only tool that let a newbie play with throwing graphics around the screen while learning a little bit of programming.  Now it's all grown up which means a great development environment (Flex Builder 3) with an excellent language (Actionscript 3) and a powerful player (Flash Player 9), but a higher barrier for entry for new creative coders. Here are a couple of golden oldies (from around the year 2000): Soulbath  (see http://www.hi-res.net/ for recent work) Yugop (beautiful new interface here ) Processing - the granddaddy of easy access computer generated art.  Initiated in 2001 by Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry, former students of John Maeda at the MIT Media Lab.  Specifically designed for graphics while hiding coding complexities (although you can get to them if you want), and a lot more powerful graphically than Flash (at least until Flash Player 9). An easy to use subset of Java. Interactive video for House of Cards by Radiohead Videos by Flight404 Open Frameworks - the young pretender, possibly with the most power. It's a C++ library that gives you lots of simplified methods for doing things that can get quite complicated in C++/OpenGL (such as loading images/sounds/movies). Also comes with a bunch of add-ons including the OpenCV (see some examples here) library which is an Intel library used for motion detection.

I Want You To Want Me by Jonathon Harris A few other tools: Nodebox - Mac only Python based 2D graphics tool. Quartz composer - node based Mac only tool (similar to vvvv or Max). I find this way of working quite crazy, but you can get beautiful results very quickly with little or no code (whether you can get the system to do exactly what you want is another question though). Silverlight - Microsoft's interactive, 'cross-platform' offering.