Gary Fixler recently gave a talk, to the Santa Monica Haskell Users Group at Brainium, in which he creates an interactive explorer for (among other images) the Mandelbrot set, using nothing but text. No complex libraries for graphics or reactivity are involved -- the only foreign import statements are to Data.Monoid, Data.Function, Data.Complex, and System.IO.

The code is here:

This gif demonstrates it:

The video is here: