One of the first people to seriously explore visual communication using consumer electronics was the German experimenter Klaus Schreiber. His work in the 1980s shaped many of the techniques still used today, especially those based on video feedback and reflections.

Schreiber was not a scientist or an engineer. He was a widower who developed a deep interest in ITC following the death of family members. Like many early ITC researchers, he saw technology as a possible bridge between the living and the dead.

Schreiber was already familiar with audio ITC such as EVP, but he became drawn to visual methods when home camcorders and televisions became widely available in Europe. He believed that spirits could manipulate electronic images and that video equipment offered a more direct channel for visual communication.

Schreiber's experiments were inventive and his work set out the blueprint for what became the classic "video loop" technique, which we cover in...