Central theme in this project, which over the years has taken on many forms, is the Japanese-Manchurian company Manchu Edison Film Studios in Shinkyo, a town in an imaginary version of Manchuria, in the apparent year 1947. This remarkable organization is run by 'katsuben', the Japanese term for the people who used to read aloud the title frames in silent Japanese films. They would travel along to theatres where a film would be showing and standing next to the screen would deliver their stories 'live'. Over the years their craftsmanship developed and they started to give their own personal interpretations of the film and of elements that would otherwise maybe have been lost to the audience. Recent developments have enabled the Manchu Edison organization to experiment with a new concept. In this environment humans are slightly different and everyone is gifted with a residual telepathy. By combining sound recordings and telepathy maybe a whole new kind of film could be produced: telepathic movies. Telepathic katsuben would not only look at the images and tell the story, and tell the story, but also telepathically communicate additional impressions to the audience, a process that the katsuben triggered through a complex memory technique learned through the use of the original device. The first, and only and last attempt by the Manchu Edison Studios to produce such a telepathic motion picture is THE LOST TRIBES, a film which unfortunately is lost now. The installation presented here is a rather literal, but probably inaccurate reconstruction of the original telepathic training device for katsuben. Sitting in front of a screen they would see places- for instance of the scenery where THE LOST TRIBES was shot- anchored by stone markers. These markers were the equivalent, inside the mental landscape of the machine, of the katsuben's beloved inter-titles. At each marker, the katsuben reconstructed the images and stories belonging to that place in the time and space of the story and to train them in the deliverance of their narration. In this way they created the mental landscape needed for telepathic communication and developed not only a knowledge of the film but also enhanced their telepathic powers. Their trainers, guides, also gave them tips how to reach the right frame of mind, so that they would be able to perform their task in front of an audience in a later stage. Now the visitor becomes a katsuben trainee. On a screen he sees pictures moving. Pictures from the lost film, the markers in he landscape that move in the mechanical reproduction of the mental space of the audience. On the table in front of the visitor is a track-ball and pointing the cursor to certain areas on the screen leads to cinematic and narrative changes in the constantly changing 3D space. In this way access is gained to the stories behind the images. These are not complete stories, rather fragments of unfinished footage from the film. Since this is perhaps an inaccurate reconstruction of the machine, it appears that the actual making of THE LOST TRIBES can be witnessed. The images refer to Machiko Uchida who worked for the Hsking Laboratories of the South Manchurian Railroad Company. She is specialized in the topology of blood and has been told by her employer to investigate a number of deaths that occurred during the production of THE LOST TRIBES. Machiko follows the crew to a location in the barren countryside of Manchuria. Then a few more people die… As in the original set-up, here guides also appear sometimes, trying to help the trainee find his way through the film fragments by gesturing to him. This installation gives us an impression of what the lost film was like, and at the same time we gain an insight as to how telepathic cinema must have looked like to its inventors.

– Carla Hoekendijk