City Distances (image above) is a work by Bestario who created the Atlas of Electromagnetic Space for the AV Festival 08 in Middlesbrough. Continuing with their research into graphing data and “making the complex comprehensible”, City Distances creates a map of the world comparing real geographical distances with informational distances as defined by Google. The map measures connectivity between locations, revealing the speed of connections and the development of networks there, the more numerous the nodes and the shorter the connections between them, the richer the economy of those locations.

This tridemsional scheme represents the strength of relations between cities from searches on google. The main idea is to compare the number of pages on internet [sic] where the two cities appear one close to the other, with the number of pages they appear isolated. This position indicates some kind of intensity of relation between the cities. After measuring this “google proximity” we divide it by its geographical distance. By this process we obtain an indicator about the strength of the relation in spite of the real distance, a kind of informational distance between cities.