Sternberg Press, ISBN 978-1915609632, English, 88 pages, 2025, UK

The Contemporary Condition book series explores the aesthetics and politics of ecosystems and the networked image as a ‘relational assemblage’, with slim yet dense books edited by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund. This book appears to be the twentieth in the series, and it seems to have been made for just that. Sollfrank and Stalder have long worked on the political dimension of data, and Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices is a book in which they consider and test ideas about data practices and natural environments. On one hand, their agency is shown through Sollfrank’s project Breathing Data, which is declared in the appendix by her and her group #purplenoise as a ‘breathing manifesto’ that uses the elements most natural to us (air and breathing) as tools for consciousness and social connection. While on the other, there is Stalder’s work with Gordan Savičić and Vladan Joler, Infrastructure of a Migratory Bird with the latter’s trademark visual style. These become the core of the writing and dialogs between the two, written down on the pages, addressing planetary contemporaneity (the technosphere, the biosphere and the atmosphere) through four temporal frameworks, from which ‘data time’ emerges. The book is printed on yellow pages, reflecting the radical approaches and non-human centrality expressed as experiential knowledge.