Instrumental Transcommunication

Instrumental transcommunication grew directly out of the electronic voice phenomena research of Juergenson and Raudive, extending from the 1980s onward into other electronic media on the reasoning, never itself independently tested, that if spirits could imprint voices on magnetic tape they might also be able to manipulate video signals, telephone lines, fax machines, or computers.

German researcher Klaus Schreiber became one of the movement's most prominent figures, claiming from 1985 to receive video images of deceased individuals, including his own daughter Karin, by pointing a video camera at a television screen and recording the resulting feedback loop, a technique that produces genuinely unpredictable, ghostly-looking patterns through ordinary electronic feedback.

Other practitioners across Europe and North America reported similar image and voice contacts through televisions tuned to static channels, computer text-generation programs, and telephone answering machines, and the movement organised its own conferences and publications through the 1990s, treating each new consumer electronic technology as a potential new channel for contact as it became available, from cordless telephones to early home computers.

The video-feedback method popularised by Schreiber and others has a straightforward conventional explanation: pointing a video camera at the screen displaying its own output creates a well-understood electronic feedback loop that generates constantly shifting, often face-like or figure-like patterns purely as an artifact of the equipment, the visual equivalent of the auditory pareidolia that explains ordinary EVP, and any face-like pattern appearing in that noise will be readily interpreted as a recognisable person by a viewer already primed to look for one, especially a grieving one hoping to see a specific face.

ITC claims involving computers and telephones have periodically been traced to deliberate hoaxing rather than equipment artifact; several publicised cases in the 1990s and 2000s were later withdrawn or discredited after the messages or images were shown to have been fabricated or staged by a participant, a pattern that echoes the documented history of fraud running through physical mediumship more broadly. No instrumental transcommunication claim, whether audio, video, or text-based, has been produced under conditions that rule out pareidolia, ordinary electronic artifact, or deliberate hoaxing, and mainstream science treats ITC as an unsupported extension of the already unreplicated EVP claim into newer consumer technology rather than as an independently evidenced phenomenon.