that first answer is basically pretty basic procedural graphics. There's a whole scene of people using smartly combined simple functions to create pretty and/or realistic shapes.

Check out 'cdak', a 4kb executable realtime animation for a rather impressive example: http://capped.tv/quite_orange-cdak (video) or ftp://ftp.untergrund.net/users/ized/prods/cdak.zip (4kb windows executable)