Keith Clark has something to tell me before we attempt to receive images from the dead.

“Here it is in a nut shell,” says Clark. “[The deceased] are here all the time. Matter of fact, they are here now. We don’t see or hear them all the time, because they are on a higher vibrational level.”

Beside Clark a handful of books on a phenomenon known as Instrumental Transcommunication, or ITC for short, rest atop the coffee table in his Salinas home. ITC is the act of receiving messages from the dead through technology like tape recorders, TVs, computers and telephones. Last year, the practice went mainstream with the 2005 release of the film White Noise, in which Michael Keaton stars as an architect who uses ITC to communicate with his recently departed wife.

The most popular form of ITC is called Electronic Voice Phenomenon, which uses a tape recorder to record voices from the other side. In 1959, a Swedish film producer named Friedrich Juergenson went outside to record bird noises. According to Juergenson and EVP enthusiasts, the producer recorded more than chirps: he taped his dead mother telling him that he was being watched.

Today, we are searching for video images from beyond rather than the utterances of the departed. Recently, Clark has been experimenting with shooting film of a mirror in a trough of water and of a crystal in a small bowl of water. He admits that there is no reason for this technique other than he has found that the dead are drawn to disturbances in energy. “All I will do now is stir the water around like making soup,” he says while laughing.

After a couple of minutes of taping the footage of the immersed mirror and crystal on a mini DV camcorder, we move to a more visually stimulating experiment. Clark blows out a couple candles resting on top of his big screen TV and announces that, “It’s spooky time.” He faces his camcorder towards the TV, which is playing back what he is recording while he records it. This causes an interesting distortion on the screen, an effect known as video feedback. He also points a flashing strobe light at the TV. “I find a strobe helps induce the feedback loop,” he says. “Besides, they are really cool for parties.”

When he gets the camera adjusted, the TV repeats an interesting pattern of images as the strobe ticks. It goes from a blue screen with jagged lines, which looks like sheets of ice, to a solid yellow color that resembles an egg yolk.  

Though we are finished recording in minutes, the next step is where the real work comes in. Clark downloads the video to his computer and slows down the recording so he can view each frame individually. Clark maintains that most people will be able to locate images without too much time spent on the computer, but he looks at every frame—there are 30 frames per second of film recorded—from four angles on his computer. For two minutes of recorded material, Clark estimates he will spend approximately 16 to 18 hours searching for messages from the afterlife.

Clark begins to sift through the images, attempting to pinpoint faces from the other world. Most of the film’s blobs look kind of like a Rorschach test, the abstract mass of ink blots on paper used by psychologists to determine a patient’s personality characteristics.

Earlier in the afternoon, Clark said that to receive images from the dead, one must have “persistence, a positive attitude and the will to communicate.” Looking at these images with Clark, I see how these qualities will help people who believe in ITC validate their claims, while skeptics could probably dismiss the pictures as nothing more than random abstract forms.

A year ago, Clark, a graduate of Monterey’s Defense Language Institute who now works as a computer service technician, was directed to the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena Web site, aaevp.com, by a friend after viewing White Noise. For Clark, the discovery of ITC came at a critical time in his life. “Basically, I had made a lot of bad decisions in life in general,” he says, staring out into his backyard. “Everything changed the first time I tried it.”

For his first attempt, Clark took a basic cassette recorder and taped in a room in his home. Though nothing was captured on that initial run, Clark discovered something on his next recording. “All I heard was a very faint voice that wasn’t mine,” he says.

Since then, Clark believes that ITC has shown him his reason for existing. “My purpose is to inform the public that life after death exists,” he says. “Since I feel this is my purpose, I spend most of my free time doing it.”

View Keith Clark’s work online at itcbridge.com