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John Jordan: The Art of Life in the Age of Mass Extinction
The Art of Life in the Age of Mass Extinction
(p. 124 – 134)

John Jordan

The Art of Life in the Age of Mass Extinction

PDF, 11 pages

  • global ecology
  • ecology
  • contemporary art
  • art theory

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John Jordan

is an art activist. He has been described as a "magician of rebellion’"by the press and a "Domestic Extremist" by the UK police. He co-founded the initiative "Reclaim the Streets" (1995–2000) and the group Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army and is co-author of the book We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (Verso, 2003). Together with Isabelle Fremeaux he coordinates The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, bringing artists and activists together to design tools and acts of disobedience. They are infamous for launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station, for turning bikes into machines of disobedience during a UN climate summit, for co-building an illegal lighthouse and refusing to 283 be censored by the BP sponsored Tate gallery. Co-authors of the film and book Les Sentiers de l‘utopie (Editions La D couverte, 2012), they now live and work on the ZAD of Notre-Dame-Des-Landes, a liberated territory in the west of France, which won the long fight against a projected airport in 2018.
Other texts by John Jordan for DIAPHANES
Marietta Kesting (ed.), Maria Muhle (ed.), ...: Hybrid Ecologies

The notion of ecology not only figures centrally in current debates around climate change, but also traverses contemporary discourses in the arts, the humanities, and the social and techno sciences. In its present reformulation it refers to the multi-layered and multi-dimensional nexus of reciprocities between living processes, technological and media practices, i.e. to the complex relations of human and nonhuman agents. The book Hybrid Ecologies understands ecology as an ambivalent notion, whose multivalence opens up new fields of action and yet, thanks precisely to this openness and vast applicability, at the same time raises questions not least concerning its genealogy. The interdisciplinary contributions seek to explore the political and social effects that a rethinking of community in ecological and thus also in biopolitical terms may provoke, and which consequences the contemporary notion of ecology might entail for artistic and design practices in particular. The present publication is the result of the fifth annual program of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies, which was conceived in cooperation with the Chair of Philosophy | Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

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