DAU is an experimental project at the intersection of performance art and cinema, initiated and led by Ilya Khrzhanovsky, and taking as its subject the Soviet Nobel laureate Lev Landau (1908–1968), a ...theoretical physicist who worked in the Physico-Technical Institute (UFTI) in Kharkiv in the 1930s. It was originally planned as a biopic but gradually an immersive art installation developed alongside it. Khrzhanovsky established his film set in the Ukrainian city and, between 2009–2011, hundreds of participants - almost all non-professional actors - lived and worked at the ‘DAU Institute’, a simulation of Soviet life. The first films created from the material shot at the DAU Institute were released in Paris in January 2019, and an immersive DAU event took place in two Paris theatres and the Centre Pompidou, for which visitors had to obtain a DAU visa. Two more films – DAU. Natasha and DAU. Degeneration – were released in the 2020 Berlin Film Festival. In April 2020 several films became available online. In the light of ongoing controversies surrounding the production process of the DAU project and films, Apparatus Journal canvassed opinions from writers, academics and curators. We are publishing academic essays as well as artistic and personal responses, some addressing the writers’ experiences of DAU (the films and/or the events) and some the wider ethical questions surrounding them. Apparatus Journal regards this as a jumping-off point and a stimulus to the future debates that will undoubtedly unfold as the repercussions of DAU become clearer. Editors of this compilation: Natascha Drubek – John Leman Riley – Irina Schulzki. Thanks to Elizaveta Shishkina.
Background: The proposed new Mental Health Act for England and Wales places a premium on identifying substantial clinical risk. This raises the question of how justifiable judgements about risk can ...be made when the evidence in this area is based upon frequentist statistical analysis which is of limited value in clinical practice. Aims: To develop a model of judgement about risk that articulates the relationship between the results of classical statistical research and the real-time reasoning of professionals in clinical practice. Methods: We use a Bayesian framework to explore the respective roles of frequentist quantities relating to classes and qualitative data idiosyncratic to individuals in real-time reasoning about risk. Results: We develop a model of naturalistic reasoning about risk within which clinical judgement is central. Conclusions: Data that stands as evidence in research literature recedes to become background knowledge in clinical practice, while difficult-to-quantify information idiosyncratic to individuals actually determines clinical judgement. This process is relatively neglected in the literature. We therefore advocate greater research into the reasoning process underlying judgements about clinical risk and advance some suggestions about how that reasoning might be better supported. It should be a matter of concern that legislation such as the proposed Mental Health Act could impair such reasoning. Declaration of Interest: None.
