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Driven by her curiosity for technological advancement, as well as by her will to evolve with her times, she decides to use the most advanced tools available to her then and begins in 1983-1984 to teach herself coding. In 1986, she purchases an Amiga 1000 computer and, playing with time, space, and movement, she starts to write codes which would animate shapes, colors, and even sounds on her computer screen. Expanding the visual language of abstraction, she creates between 1986 and 1989 a series of 57 kinetic paintings: each line of code provokes a shape or pattern in a primary color to appear, move or repeat on the screens, sometimes accompanied by early computer chimes and beeps embedded in the encoding.
These experimentations with computer-generated visuals naturally evolve into the Kinetic Painting Program in the 1990s. Instead of coding single paintings, Halaby transforms the keyboard of her PC into a live digital painting instrument, which she uses for her performances with the Kinetic Painting Group. During these performances, the artist presents digital paintings in real-time, hitting digits on her keyboard to provoke a shape, line, or pattern to appear, move, shift color, or repeat on the screen in front of the audience, accompanied by live musicians improvising a sound score.