This paper will discuss how the Significant Walks project explores the impact of walking with chronic low back pain and considers how experience and reflection visualize the impact of this often overlooked condition. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the project involved working with participants to investigate a regularly encountered personal walk as a measure of individual capability, physical experience and well-being. The use of digital technologies created a sense of presence by synthesizing point of view video documentation with simultaneously gathered biomechanical data recording the movement of the spine. Additional layers of interpretation were added to the synthesized footage as each participant explored how visual effects could express the issues they faced whilst walking. Driven by the biomechanical data the intensity of these effects results in a sequence of films that are simultaneously qualitative and quantitative with the challenge and reward of each walk creating highly personalized visual narratives that explore place and movement through acute visual detail.

This paper will be accompanied by video extracts of participant walks showing how each micro journey interprets clinically accurate data whilst also expressing individual experience. The collaborative nature of the research situates reflective researchers and participants at the core of scientific understanding. In identifying how physical movement can reveal the intersection of quantitative knowledge and qualitative experience the research confirms that when we ‘seize “sensation”... we find ‘a formation already bound up with a larger whole, already endowed with a meaning.’ (Merleau-Ponty, M. (1996) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Pg 9)

http://significantwalks.com/