The life of abandoned trolleys

Trolley Spotting, by Adele Prince, uses an interactive map to document the artist’s findings from recent ‘trolley spotting’ trips.

The shopping trolleys that have been abandoned (or ‘liberated’) from supermarkets manage to travel quite some distance from their ‘home’ supermarket, and often start to acquire items as they go.

trolley.jpg

The website allows you an insight into the private lives of shopping trolleys which have escaped the supermarkets. Using GPS, Prince tracks the co-ordinates of each trolley. She takes a photograph of it, 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. Besides, the artist is working 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.

Via networked_performance.