Inga McCaslin Frick and Gillian Brown first became colleagues in the mid '80s. The former was trained as a photographer and conceptual artist, the latter as a painter. From near opposing camps they shared a common impulse to explore how experience is comprehended and ordered. Like borrowed clothes, ideas, techniques and imagery migrated from one studio to the other and the artists got used to casual trespasses into each others' artistic territories. In 1997, the artists were invited to participate in a symposium and exhibition of artists and scientists concerned with perceptual thresholds sponsored by Denis Pelli at the Perceptual Psychology department at New York University. This gave them the impetus to develop their first intentional collaboration. As the title of the resulting video installation, You/Me, suggests, the process of collaboration itself became folded into the content of the work. Through the dance of co-authorship the formation of communicative thought was made newly manifest. This conversation continued and deepend when they collaborated on Each/Other, a meditation on psychological boundaries accompanied by a text from the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty. In 2000-2001 the team completed work on their most ambitious project to date, Turnaround Time, an interactive installation employing face-recognition software, while on fellowship at Harvard University.
