A SPECIES BETWEEN WORLDS: OUR NATURE, OUR SCREEN BY JOHN MACK
Artist, author, and lecturer John Mack opens his month-long immersive exhibition and forum A Species Between Worlds: Our Nature, Our Screens in New York City’s Chelsea district today.
Photo Credit: John Mack
A Species Between Worlds showcases more than 65 of John Mack’s artworks in a 17,000 sq ft exhibition space, featuring imagery of more than 50 U.S. National Parks and the Seven Wonders of the Natural World, all manipulated and combined with artificial landscapes from the Pokémon Go app.
Photo Credit: A Species Between Worlds, John Mack
Pokémon Go launched in 2016 and quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. The Augmented Reality app uses location-based technology to place colourful ‘pocket monsters’ in the real world and has been downloaded by more than a billion people.
A Species Between Worlds was inspired by the mass stampedes to catch Pokémon around the world, which led Mack to explore how the phenomenon was blurring the boundaries between virtuality and reality. Developed over the past six years, this exhibition examines the intersection of humanity and technology, via a gamified meditation experience aimed at restoring balance between ourselves and our smart devices.
In an interview with Associated Press today, John Mack said: ‘In that Pokémon Go stampede, what one witnesses is…a mass migration of humanity, leaving the natural landscape and running toward artificiality. And in a sense the human, right now on the planet, is in a migration toward virtuality.
‘I really wanted to do a show that could bring to life what it is we're putting behind us, what it is we're chasing, and is it really worth it?’
A Species Between Worlds has a customised app that guides visitors throughout the exhibition, framed by the artifice of the Pokémon Go interface, which gradually fades as reality is restored.
Alongside Mack’s ground-breaking artwork, A Species Between Worlds features a rich program of talks and events, free to the public, that will convene thought leaders from around the world on the increasingly slippery boundary between our humanity and our technology.
Program highlights include Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen; a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind; a panel hosted by Stanford University Professors Rob Reich, Jeremey Weinstein and Mehran Sahami to discuss their book, System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot; a panel on the State of Social Media featuring NYU’s Jonathan Haidt, Center for Humane Technology’s Tristan Harris, NYC school commissioner David Banks, and much more.
John Mack is an artist, photographer, author, lecturer and the founder of the non-profit initiative Life Calling, whose mission is to foster awareness and balance for society in the Digital Age. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and universities on the subjects of technology, awareness and consciousness.
Mack says: ‘I’m very consciously not anti-technology, but rather I aim to foster mindfulness so that our devices serve as our tools and not the other way around. The exhibition is an invitation to contemplate our relationship to our devices and the surrounding world while inspiring the introspection needed to prevent the loss of our humanity.’
A Species Between Worlds is supported by Tavros Capital, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
The exhibition also coincides with the publication (powerHouse Books) of Mack’s collection of poetry, A Land Between Worlds: The Shifting Poetry of the Great American Landscape. The collection is John Mack’s vision of who we are in relation to our environment, and looks for clues as to whether a balance between nature and today's increasingly seductive technology can be attained. A Land Between Worlds is the result of John Mack’s epic ‘reconnaissance mission’, having crisscrossed the entire United States of America over a four-year journey.
A SPECIES BETWEEN WORLDS: OUR NATURE, OUR SCREENS
537 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
September 1 – 30, 2022