Digital Ornament

Gaming and visualisation software has a history of developing economical and creative methods to deal with hardware limitations. Traditionally the visual representation of gaming has been a poor offspring of high-end architectural visualisation. In a twist of irony, the paper proposes that game production software leads the way into a new era of physical digital ornament. The toolbox of the rendering engine evolved rapidly between 1974-85 and it is still today 20 years later the main component of all visualisation programs. The development of the bump map is of particular interest, its evolution into a physical displacement map provides untold opportunities in the appropriation of the 2D image to a physical artifact. Contemporary Architects in tandem have been mapping to the façade a new era of complex three-dimensional sculptural representation. The Architect, Designer and Artist now have the opportunity to appropriate the image map and use advanced visualisation technologies in the application of digital ornament.