John Jordan's work merges the imagination of art and the social engagement of politics.  Co-director of interdisciplinary social practice art group Platform (1987-1995), which was profoundly influenced by Beuys and social sculpture, he then went on to be a co-founder of the infamous direct action collective Reclaim the Streets (1995-2000). Working with social movements as his material became the central concern of his practice. This involved constantly blurring boundaries between being an activist and an artists and involved collectively creating political events and situations that felt neither like activism or art but had the best of both these worlds embedded within them. The idea was not to make political art but to apply creative thinking and practise to radical politics, to reject representation in favour of transformation.

He has written and lectured extensively about the space between art and activism, co-editing the book We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism published by Verso in 2003 and translated into 7 languages. He was Senior lecturer in fine art at Sheffield Hallam University until he gave up academia to go to Argentina to work on the film The Take with Naomi Klein, which explores the self management and direct democracy experiments after the uprising.  He still sees teaching as a core part of his practice and regularly teaches courses and workshops in creative forms of resistance.

 In 2002 he set up the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA), which brought together clowning and civildisobedience. Although he went Awol in 2006, CIRCA has now become part of the iconography of the anticapitalist movements and continues to spread. 

He is currently searching for ways to build lifeboats that will take us out of the ecological collapse of civilisation.  Working with the Laboratory of Insurectionary Imagination he is preparing a book and film Paths Through Utopias ( to be published by La Decouverte) which explores anticapitalist and ecological living experiments in Europe. This project will eventually give rise to setting up a new ecological community based on principles of permaculture that overcomes art with radical forms of everyday life.