WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Celebrity Hurricanes (Zine)

I have a fascination with naming conventions and systems. I was researching the naming cycles of hurricanes when I had a thought “isn’t it funny when humans are given non-human names and non-humans are given human names”. A girl called Wednesday and a hurricane called Katrina. I then started compiling lists of objects with human names and humans with object names and created a series of archives. One of these archives was celebrity children with non-human names and Hurricanes with human names. The book is organised by year or birth and year of hurricane.

Hurricane (Book)

The National Hurricane Center began formally naming storms in 1950. Before the use of short male and female names, hurricanes had been categorized by latitude and longitude numerics. Although easy to track for meteorologists, this method was confusing for the general public.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is now responsible for the lists of hurricane names and the naming conventions which regulate their use. The WMO keeps six lists of 21 male and female names that are used in rotation and are recycled every six years (there are no names that start with the letters Q,U,X or Z). If there are more than 21 storms in a season, the Greek alphabet is used to name additional hurricanes. Only when a hurricane is exceptionally catastrophic, it’s name is retired and a new name is put in place for the following cycles.

This book is a physical translation of this naming system. The book has no determined beginning or end and is bound using one screw in the top left corner. The pages are spun around the screw to create an object which embodies the hurricane.

What’s In a Name? (Video)

While researching naming conventions I became fascinated with these lists of lists of lists full of things named after people and people after things. This video is an example of some of the exciting linkages I found.  (Work still in progress)