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.