For tourists, guidebooks serve as a means of navigation and a reference for ‘must-see’ destinations. They deliver an authoritative account of the most desirable places by drawing from the experience of others. Guidebooks also provide a sense of comfort in foreign situations. This series of guidebooks quantifies the collective experience of leisure travel by visually representing global tourist movements during one year.
Using data from the UN World Tourism Organization I made a guidebook to every country in the world. The number of pages in each book corresponds to the number of tourist arrivals in that country in 2005. When viewed on a shelf, one year's worth of 'experience' is presented in a condensed physical model that can be shifted and rearranged to visualize where tourists travel and where they don't. Underlying the guidebooks is a working hypothesis that the collective movement of tourists is not merely coincidental but is a highly orchestrated act influenced by the knowledge that others have been there before.
For information about my process, click here.
