BAD-ASS CAMERA.(The Talk of the Town)

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. On one of those stifling days a couple of weeks ago, Ross took his new camera for an inaugural outing in Central Park. The test was in anticipation of its deployment, a few days later, to a wetlands preserve in southwestern Brazil, for a shoot--"a Fitzcarraldo kind of adventure," as Ross put it--arranged and underwritten by the Brazilian Foundation for Sustainable Development and the National Geographic Society. Ross and his team mustered at the south end of the Great Lawn and mounted the R2, along with a few crates of monitors and computers, on the bed of a Central Park Conservancy pickup truck. The R2 is a high-resolution digital video camera that shoots in three hundred and sixty degrees. Specifically, it is a bouquet of nine cameras, nine mirrors, and nine microphones, arrayed in a circle and mounted on a tripod; it resembles a lunar module, or an apocalyptic explosive device, but the sunbathers and ice-cream eaters paid it little mind, the heat amplifying their native nonchalance.

Ross, who is fifty-three, has a salty beard and a candy-shop smile, and wore a yellow ball cap from a bar in the Virgin Islands. Among his helpers were two filmmakers, brothers, from Tel Aviv, Liron and Tal Unreich. "We're trying to learn how to use the camera," Ross explained, standing in a shady spot as the Unreichs set up. "This is a dry run to learn how we can fail--are we missing a wire or do we need more apple crates to boost it up? There's no manual for the R2." Nor, frankly, is there a display system yet. What Ross has in mind is a cyclorama--a theatre in the round, which would, he hopes, vastly improve on the one at Epcot, which is ...