When I was up in the arctic for the filming of the NOVA program “Arctic Passage,” I and others of the crew wore cold-weather gear emblazoned with the phrase “Long Live Dreams”® – this had been the slogan of the “American Express Franklin Memorial Expedition,” whose parkas, down pants, and windsuits had been very kindly loaned to the film crew by Rebecca Harris, the leader of the expedition. In an age or corporate sponsorship, such a thing was as much a necessity as a GPS transponder, but the idea of such a phrase being trademarked by a company struck me as enormously strange. At one point after a long day’s shoot, Harald Paalgard, our director of photography, expressed his weariness by reading the phrase out in lugubrious tones reminiscent of the the Addams Family’s Lurch (”You rang?”), like this: Loooonnngg . . . .liiiivvvvve . . . . dreeeammmms. It reduced us all to tears of laughter.

I’ve been working on an interdisciplinary collaborative hybrid art/research project for the last year and a half. Its called Arctic Listening Post and includes a series of works that explore our cultural imaginary of the Arctic, particularly focusing on climate change. This networked conversation, Climate Commons, began as I spent a year in a research blog project, Deepnorth, a virtual expedition to the North Pole, in which I gathered from the internet each day an image, a fact, or a story, and slowly accrued a kind of narrative mapping of the representations of the North Pole, from science, history, sports feats, mass media, art, fiction, and politics.