Significant Walks

This paper will describe the trajectory of research between Thinking Path and Significant Walks and how the latter explores the reality of walking for individuals with chronic low back pain. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, Significant Walks pools the expertise of a research team that share a mutual interest in the resonance of walking as an interpretive tool and who came together following Shirley Chubb’s exhibition Thinking Path, which took Charles Darwin’s daily ritual of walking the same path in the grounds of his family home as its inspiration. The collaborative research team are working with a group of participants who are invited to identify a personal walk that encapsulates memory, reminiscence and familiarity as well as being a measure of their physical experience. Manifested as an immersive digital artwork, a methodology has been identified that synthesizes eye level video documentation of participant’s personal walks with simultaneously gathered streams of kinematic data recording the movement of the spine. Researchers and participants work together to explore how the interpretive qualities of visual effects can be applied to each body of synthesized footage in order to express the nature and resonance of personal movement whilst walking. Each micro journey expresses individual experience through the interpretation of clinically accurate data and acts as a vehicle for precise accounts of physical movement whilst also presenting the reflective individual at the core of scientific understanding