Day-to-Day Data
Adele Prince
Title: Trolley Spotting
Location: Web-based commission for this website
Launch Project >

Adele’s project uses an interactive map to display her findings from recent ‘trolley spotting’ trips. On 14 May 2005 Adele visited Nottingham, carrying out an extensive survey of trolley activity in the local area. She photographed and logged every single trolley she discovered. Jam-packed with trolley data, the website allows you an incite into the private lives of shopping trolleys which have escaped the local supermarkets. Adele is making three versions of the Trolley Spotting map, each localised around the different venues on the exhibition tour. In Nottingham, she is working with Marks & Spencer and special turquoise Trolley Spotting tags will be attached to their entire fleet of trolleys for the duration of the exhibition.
tracking trolleys with a Global Positioning System
tracking trolleys with a Global Positioning System
For Day-to-Day Data, I am documenting shopping trolleys that have been abandoned (or ‘liberated’) from supermarkets local to each of the three gallery venues. I am fascinated by the fact that these trolleys manage to travel quite some distance from their ‘home’ supermarket, and often start to acquire items as they go. The trolleys look quite dejected as they sit at the side of the road, or peep out from behind a tree and I am interested in capturing the different methods of disposal, ranging from careless dumping to considered parking. I would like to determine if trolley dispersal differs in different areas of the country and in different parts of a city. It is something I became aware of whilst living in Islington, where most visitors to the local supermarket walk home with their shopping instead of using a car, so therefore feel the need to adopt a trolley when they exceed a manageable number of bags.

As part of my research process, I am spending time in each of the three cities the exhibition visits, documenting trolleys in the local area. Using a Global Positioning System, I track my journey and the co-ordinates of each of the trolleys I find. For each trolley, I take a photograph, document the model and make of the trolley, the date, time, location and distance from the supermarket. This information is then transferred to an interactive map online, where visitors can go on a virtual trolley spotting walk and play a shopping cart game. Visitors to the galleries can pick up a map that will take them on a shopping trolley tour of their city, taking in trolley hot spots and allowing them to add their own trolleys along the way. Alongside the creation of maps, I am working closely with local supermarkets, tagging their trolleys so that they can be easily identified and to alert people to the fact that they are being monitored.

Adele Prince
April 2005


www.adeleprince.com


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