The Science Gallery, at Trinity College in Dublin , is showing students how they can combine two disciplines they might have thought of as incompatible, reports John Holden.

Most of us regard scientific whizz-kids as a different breed to arty types. Science students focus on solving problems and asking why things are the way they are. Art students, on the other hand, are said to be more interested in creativity and how things look. But the two have more in common than one might think. The creativity needed in science and technology tends to be ignored. Nor are the technical skills of artists often acknowledged. How both types of subject are taught at school, and how they are perceived, reinforce these stereotypes.

The Science Gallery at Trinity College in Dublin - the first of its kind in the world - focuses on the parallels between the two disciplines. This new public creative space aims to push the frontiers of science and technology into all other disciplines. Artscience refers to "a bringing to bear of aesthetic methods to scientific problems or, conversely, the application of science to aesthetics". The gallery has been blending the two with good effect.

As well as exhibitions and workshops, the gallery will be running Be Made, a transition-year mentoring programme that gives students an opportunity to be trained by experts and exhibit work alongside the world's leading technical artists and punk scientists.

"For every theme in the gallery there will be one installation by TY or other second-level students," says Lynn Scarff, Trinity's education and outreach officer. "The current theme is light. The next theme is called 'Technothreads' and will be a meeting of fashion and science.

"Students come in once a week for around two months," she says. "In that time they meet up with our mentors, who help them with their project. For the last project we had a very gifted group of experts. The mechanical artist Mick Kelly, the new-media artist Ralph Borland and the technical artists Tim Redfern and Ben Ganlon, as well as two engineers from Google, all gave their time to help students. Most of them would all be trained in engineering and are now applying their skills to art."

The students in the first group, which began last November and finished this month, already had links with Trinity. But the course is open to everyone in the future. You don't even have to be studying art or science. "You just need to be interested," says Scarff. "Most students' experience of science would not have been too good. They would not really see it as a creative subject. But both science and technology are incredibly creative. Because they get involved in a project, it makes the learning process entirely different from school. The fact that they are working side by side with professional artists is also very beneficial."

Bláithín Ní Dhubhgain, a 15-year-old scientist at Newpark Comprehensive School in Blackrock, Co Dublin, had been on the TY Physics Experience at Trinity last year. "That's how I found out about the gallery," she says. "We spent the first few weeks of the programme getting to know different materials and learning how to work with circuits and soldering irons. The theme of our project is light, so we are using LED lights on Arduino boards to create images that work in certain sequences. Each of us is doing our own. Mine is of the Dublin city skyline and the Liffey. It is supposed to show how light pollution is taking away from the beauty of the surroundings."

Ciarán Kennedy, a 16-year-old scientist and artist from Skerries Community College, in Co Dublin, is involved in the project, too. "I'm doing a sunset which will be movement-activated. When you pass by it the sun rises and falls. I've been here doing my work experience for the past week also. It's been really hectic in here, so I'm just helping out anywhere I can.

"It is a really great place," he adds. "It makes science so much more interesting and engaging than usual. Science is really boring in school. Too much of it is simply taught straight from the book. We need to start doing more practical work and experiments like the project we're doing in the gallery."

Liane Henry, another scientist from Newpark, agrees. "You don't get to do this kind of stuff in school," she says. "And the fact is it's much easier to learn about something when you are physically doing a project. Science used to be just about figuring out problems. But that's changing, and now it is used in art projects and all sorts of things. That's good, because it encourages more people to take an interest in it. The science gallery will have a really great impact. It's way more interactive than a traditional science museum, so it will be more appealing to regular people not necessarily that interested in science."

See www.sciencegallery.ie. Lynn Scarff is at 01-8964095 and lynnscarff@ sciencegallery.com. She welcomes applications from second-level students; the next exhibition is at the end of April

The Science Gallery may be the first of its kind in the world, but merging science with art is not new. Plenty of famous creators, from the Renaissance to the present day, have crossed all boundaries. The term "Renaissance man" usually refers to someone innovative, someone with no fear of trying new things, someone who sees no boundaries between pursuits.

Nobody was more like this than Leonardo da Vinci, who lived from 1452 to 1519. Aside from being responsible for such masterpieces as the Mona Lisa, he was interested in astronomy, anatomy, botany, weaponry, cartography, mathematics, aeronautics, optics, mechanics, hydraulics, sonics, civil engineering and geology.

Another Renaissance man was the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, who lived from 1577 to 1640. He was deeply involved in the natural sciences and had links with several of the major scientists of Europe, including Galileo Galilei. He collected plants that he then painted and analysed. "Many of his paintings could also be considered works of botany and zoology, such was the level of scientific detail in each," says Michael John Gorman, director of the Science Gallery.

The author of Faust, one of the most-read poems in history, was also a keen scientist. In fact, even though Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1842) is remembered as a literary genius, he regarded his scientific work as far more important. He was particularly interested in colour and did not agree with Isaac Newton's theory that white light is a combination of the seven colours of the spectrum. In 1810 he published his own, contentious theory, which became widely accepted in the art world. It was a great influence on Joseph Turner, whose paintings can be seen in the National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin. His work on plants was also read by Charles Darwin.

The graphic art of MC Escher, a Dutchman who lived from 1898 to 1972, is studied by artists and mathematicians alike. He played with depth, gravity and infinity, and he could not have drawn otherworldly characters and places without a knowledge of geometry. In one of his best-known prints, Drawing Hands, two hands draw one another. Other prints show fish turning into birds and other creatures. In Ascending and Descending, people appear to be climbing up and down a never-ending staircase.

"He seems to have been naturally mathematical at first," says Gorman. "But in later years he began to link up with professional mathematicians, such as HSM Coxeter and Roger Penrose. Escher had a fascination for impossible spaces and trying to create things, places and times that any human being couldn't possibly have known."

Carl Djerassi, emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University, is both a novelist and playwright and one of the inventors of the contraceptive pill. His novel Cantor's Dilemma explores the morality of scientific research; some of his plays have names such as Calculus and Oxygen.

If you want to learn about more people who have blended art and science, check out Piero della Francesca, Johannes Kepler, Gerhard Richter, Miroslav Holub and Steve Dobbs.