Tiphaine Buccino · 2024
Pretty
Noise
Large-format landscapes generated from IGN LiDAR scan data of French territory.
Enter the work
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Tiphaine Buccino · 2024
Large-format landscapes generated from IGN LiDAR scan data of French territory.
Enter the workI come from photography, and I haven't stopped making photographs — I've just stopped needing a camera.
For twenty years my practice has been built around a single obsession: controlling what the viewer sees, and what remains in shadow. Light as selection. Darkness as suspense.
Pretty Noise continues that practice through new means. The raw material is LiDAR scan data from the IGN — France's national geographic institute — released openly for administrative purposes. I take this neutral, bureaucratic topography and charge it. Cone lights, atmospheric layers, editorial framing: the land becomes a stage. The IGN data gives the terrain its truth. My light gives it a story.
The work operates on two scales simultaneously. From a distance, a painting — mood, drama, atmosphere. Up close, a document — every ridge, every slope, real coordinates. The viewer steps back to take in the whole, then moves forward to lose themselves in it, hunting for detail. The image holds both distances at once.
Pretty Noise is a series of large-format prints generated from HD LiDAR point cloud data covering French territory. Each image begins as millions of elevation measurements, acquired by the IGN for cartographic purposes and made publicly available as open data.
Through a 3D pipeline built in Blender, this raw data is transformed into composed landscapes — lit, framed, and rendered at print sizes exceeding one metre. The series inherits the visual language of photography: focal light, deep shadow, cinematic atmosphere. But where a photograph witnesses a moment, these images construct one.
The terrain is real. The light is invented. That tension is the work.
Selected works
Based in Burgundy, France. Twenty years of photographic practice moving between documentary instinct and constructed fiction — always governed by the same question: what to show, and what to hide.
Pretty Noise (2024–ongoing) marks a shift from lens-based to synthetic image-making, while maintaining the same foundational concerns: composed light, hidden detail, landscapes that withhold as much as they reveal.
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