One might think that engineering and art are as opposite as day and night, men and women, dogs and cats or the Beatles and Milli Vanilli.

Don't be fooled by the obvious.

This past fall, through grants from Commodore Business Machines, AT&T and Digital Equipment Corporation, the College of Engineering acquired about $924,000 worth of equipment necessary to begin a computer visualization lab.

Laboratory coordinator Rob Fisher, who holds an engineering degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a graduate degree in industrial design, was instrumental in creating the new lab. He exemplifies the art and engineering paradox: Fisher is a full-time sculptor and an artist-in-residence at the College of Engineering.

"The lab is really a product of a philosophy of the artist in residence program. Namely, that engineering is not an isolated discipline but that the technologies that engineers develop often have major artistic characteristics," Fisher said.

For example, although the Commodore Amiga and the Silicon Graphics computers are technologically complex machines, Fisher said the average person could become acclimated to the software and begin designing images after only a few instructional sessions.

"Half the programs in here I've learned just through sitting down and playing around with them or through the tutorials that they've offered in the class," said Paul Wilson (sophomore-art), who is one of Fisher's advanced students.

Although the lab is considered a part of the College of Engineering, Fisher said the new facility is available to all majors through a computer visualization course that he teaches.

The course, which can be taken for as little as one credit or as many as three, can be used to satisfy a variety of general education requirements including arts, engineering or science technology and society courses. Fisher described the course curriculum as loosely taught and experimental.

"We're feeling our way into it," he said.

Fisher said the flexibility and experimental nature of the course allows disparate groups to learn from one another.

"This is an opportunity for engineers, artists and scientists to work together to learn how to take advantage of this new tool. As these different groups work together, the lines of distinction which are traditionally drawn at a university, and society as well, become blurred."

This semester roughly 50 students, divided into an advanced and beginner's group, are enrolled in the course, Fisher said. The advanced group is currently working on an interesting project.

In 1992, an historic voyage to Mars, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of the new world, is scheduled to take place. Similar to Columbus' original fleet -- including the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria -- three new vessels, one each from Asia, America and Europe, will be powered by space sails. However, this time the solar energy of the sun and not the wind will set the sails in motion. In addition, they will be sailing through space and not across the Atlantic Ocean.

Fisher said the prototypes have been proposed and evaluated and scientists have agreed this type of space travel is realistic. "The ultimate value of it is that they're reusable space crafts that don't have any fuel in them, and therefore, once they assembled in space they can sail forever up there and they can be used for traveling to the stars," he said.

Sail designs are being chosen through an international competition.

Different groups around the world are working individually to design sails that they can enter into the competition which, if won, will send their design into space.

Fisher's advanced group is currently visualizing via computer graphics the intended deployment and journey of the sails through space.

"We're taking other people's designs, putting them into the computer and actually giving them pictures of what it's going to look like, which could probably help them figure out any design problems," Wilson said.

The design teams will have to rely on private industry for benefactors because the competition prohibits the intervention of government in designing, funding and building the sails.

Wilson said that the advanced group's visualizations will be crucial in persuading corporations to support individual designers.

Fisher said his advanced group became involved in the project after he had spoken with a representative from the Soviet Union's design team. Fisher described the group's involvement as serendipitous.

"If that Russian scientist had not had lunch with my associate and that associate had tried to call me and not get me, which is typical, it never would have happened," he said.

Fisher said he sees the advanced group's involvement in the solar sail project as benefiting the students as well as the University.

"It is a fantastic opportunity for the University to piggyback on an event which is going to be an extremely exciting and imaginative and a grand technical achievement for the '90s kind of event. I mean it's going to become one of the events of the decade."