Three years ago, the artist Clifford Ross unveiled the R1, a still camera of his own design and construction—a Rube Goldberg assemblage of cadged and commissioned parts. Although it used film, it captured far more detail than any other camera, digital or not; the resolution was five hundred times as high as that of your run-of-the-mill digital point-and-click. In Ross's giant landscapes, you can make out the woodgrains on barn shingles thousands of feet away, and see mountain trails seven miles off. The pictures seem to be made not of pixels but of vision itself.

The subsequent curiosity and admiration of scientists turned Ross, who had previously made abstract paintings and photographs of ocean waves, into a congregator of technical minds—a high-res den leader—and before long he began conceiving a successor to the R1, which would draw on the expertise of his new genius friends, and, of course, enable him to make art.

Behold the R2.