Data Rush

Data Rush is the catalogue for the 2015 Noorderlicht International Photofestival, gathering fifty photographers and multimedia artists working on the tension between personal data and digital control.

Curated by Wim Melis, the festival took data traffic itself as its subject, asking how photographers could make visible something with no fixed physical form. The catalogue reproduces work from the festival's Groningen exhibition, held in the city's former Sugar Factory, alongside supporting texts on the show's central question: how much control people retain over the data their lives generate online and off.

Noorderlicht, founded in 1991, has run its international photofestival annually since and operates its own publishing arm through Aurora Borealis. Data Rush appeared the same year the WikiLeaks and NSA disclosures were reshaping public debate about mass data collection, a context the festival's programming addressed directly.