For Ken Goldberg, it's a chance to see like a fish. For Christian Moller, it's an opportunity to question the ubiquitous happy face. For Jennifer Steinkamp, it's the prospect of using a historic building as a canvas for interactive, computer-generated art.

And those are only half of the adventures-in-progress for "Neuro," a yearlong art-science collaboration that will culminate in an exhibition opening in April at two Pasadena institutions: Art Center College of Design and Caltech. Simon Penny, for example, is designing an environment that will allow people to experience the perceptions of electro-sensing fish. Jessica Bronson is devising an image or text that can be seen only with peripheral vision.

As for Martin Kersels, don't ask. He might take information gathered for a particular purpose by one device -- a seismograph, microphone, pollution indicator or rain gauge, say -- and "trans- code" it to do something completely different, possibly play music on an electronic keyboard. Or maybe not.

"I'm fumbling in an ill-lit room," Kersels says of his nascent project. "Not a dark room, but a room that needs a little more light."

"Neuro" itself -- which has teamed six tech-savvy, California- based artists with Caltech scientists and students -- is a work in progress. But whatever it turns out to be when lights go on at the exhibition, it has already generated a lot of interdisciplinary investigation. And that's the point, the organizers say.

"Artists see things with different eyes and allow us to take a step back and reflect on what we do," says Pietro Perona, a specialist in human and computer vision who directs Caltech's Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering. The center, where scientists attempt to endow machines with senses and sensory-like behavior, is Art Center's partner in the project. "Scientific research is supposed to be about everything, but even at universities we are pushed to be quite narrow," he says. "We lose sight of the big picture, so this is a good thing for us."

Perona admits to approaching the project with a certain trepidation. "The artists I had met before were so non-concrete, so touchy-feely. I appreciate their work, but I didn't think the collaboration would be easy," he says. "But the artists we are working with understand our mind-set very well, maybe more than we understand theirs. We are much closer than I thought."

For Stephen Nowlin, director of Art Center's Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, the crux of the project is "bringing these two cultures together" to "find common ground between art and science that sparks creativity."