Tiphaine Buccino · 2023
Pretty
Noise
Large-format landscapes generated from IGN LiDAR scan data of French territory.
Enter the work
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Tiphaine Buccino · 2023
Large-format landscapes generated from IGN LiDAR scan data of French territory.
Enter the workFor twenty years my practice has been built around a single obsession: a dialogue between light and shadow, the explicit and the implicit. Between the stated and the feared.
Pretty Noise continues that practice through new means. Like my earlier series, these landscapes are empty of human presence — and yet something has clearly happened, or is about to. But the crime isn't just around the corner anymore.
What if the victim is right under my own eyes? What if I am witnessing a crime of which I am the perpetrator? What if I was the victim, the judge and the savior all at once?
State of shock.
The time feels suspended before the void and the terror. The mountain doesn't move. Not for one. Here I oscillate between contemplation and overwhelm. Dissociation sets in — that particular state where I watch the world, fully present and utterly powerless. Spectator of the despair.
LiDAR works like sonar, but with light: a device fires infrared beams and times their return after impact.
Distance = (travel time ÷ 2) × speed of light
Millions of simultaneous beams draw a point cloud faithful to the real.
Over the past few years, the IGN — France's national mapping institute — has flown the entire country with airborne LiDAR: one point every 30 cm, across the whole territory. The data is public, open to anyone.
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.