The wide-ranging work of Heinz Mack not only makes use of the traditional media of art, but also the most modern industrial technologies and communication media.

The art historian Wieland Schmied makes the following comparison: he quotes: "I need great ideas, and I believe that if one were to commission from me a plan for a new universe I would be crazy enough to start work on it at once."
Schmied continues: "This avowal is 250 years old and is from Piranesi - if I didn't know who had first uttered it I would not hesitate to attribute it to Heinz Mack. Just as I would entrust him with the rebuilding of the tower of Babylon. It would probably be a tower of light which he would try to build, more infinite than Brancusi's endless pillar, a vibrating light stele which connects earth to the heavens."

Heinz Mack: "I wanted to enter a paradise on earth during my lifetime - at least the front garden thereof. Why shouldn't that be possible? There is a pre-hell on Earth. The pathway which is filled with light does not lead - I hope so anyway - into dark-ness, this is the path I follow."

In all his projects Mack feels at one with nature. He says: "Everything that I did in the Arctic and in the desert did not harm the inviolacy of nature but confirmed it." Oases of silver stele in the Sahara, ridges of fiery magnesium along the glaciers of the Arc-tic, artificial gardens in the sea, these things arouse his imagination, just as the sur-prising harmony between natural and artificial phenomena does.
Mack's intuition understands technology as an instrument to make natural phenom-ena visible, and to make creative use of them.

Heinz Mack dared to look into the future: "Tomorrow though we will be on the lookout for a new dimension in art, must visit new spaces in which our works will gain an in-comparable appearance. Such spaces are the heavens, the ocean, the Antarctic, the deserts. The reservations for the arts will lie in them like artificial islands."

Dieter Honisch, the former director of the National gallery in Berlin writes in his text for the book Mack-Skulpturen (Econ Verlag, Düsseldorf, Wien, New York, 1986):

"... In his Sahara Project he has not only pre-programmed the Land-Art in a new concept from 1976, but also influenced artists such as Walter de Maria.
 ... It is remarkable that Mack is not mentioned as the driving force behind many later solutions, especially not there where he went into big dimensions very early with his works. This may be connected with the fact that one always regarded him in re-spect to individual works, never in respect of the landscape or urban environment which now determines his work. Mack first enters characteristic global and urban situations in 1968.
The fact that Mack continues his work in public spaces and that without any restric-tions on his own imagination speaks for him especially in this time. Exactly because his imagination went beyond that of private collectors and museums and they were forced into realisation by him, the enormous life performance from Mack is to be es-pecially appreciated...
If I have connected Mack with ZERO again and again, I have to remember a question he once asked of me: "Why can one still not think of my works without thinking of ZERO?"
This question is relatively easy for me to answer. Because no other artist at that time caused a renewal of art in such an astonishingly simple yet convincing way as Heinz Mack. His openness towards nature (Sahara Project) and the meaningfulness which he gave to light as the creator of a new sensual quality (fascination), the mastery of technique which allowed for new phenomena (vibration, movement), and the reduc-tion of picturesqueness to a basic principle (structure zone), complied with the per-ception of an artificial permeation of the world which was the intention of this artistic movement, that no other artist was connected more strongly with this idea than Mack......"

Max Bense writes in the book Mack - Kunst in der Wüste (Josef Keller Verlag, Starnberg 1969):
"... Even the space which Mack includes in the  Sahara Project  becomes a medium for aesthetic states, created innovations of light, which by vibration, concentration and reflection is handed over to a freedom of design by selection, which goes beyond Kandinsky, allowing one to speak of not only the emancipation of colour and form but of the emancipation of light.
Finally to the objects, the stele, the mirrored walls, the sails, the slices of glass, the sand reliefs. They are the carriers of the aesthetic states, which give the endless probability of the labyrinth of the desert, the space, the light the unique discontinuity, interruption, visual innovation, improbability and information. As I said artificially cre-ated carriers on the one hand, but at the same time in the role of symbols which gain, due to chaos and the labyrinth, in orientation, in orderliness, that is in aesthetic affec-tivity. The aesthetic state, which interests Mack, is not bound to the carrier like a painting to a canvas or a sculpture to a metal or marble body. The aesthetic state appears here more as an ethereal body of the carrier, by means of including the sand, light and space; the carrier does not manifest the aesthetic state, it sets it in motion.
It is firstly this function of the carrier which constitutes the planned aesthetic state truly as an "artificial space" as Mack says, and as a "Reservation for Art" as he adds...

Mack comments in the same book as follows on his own artistic expeditions:

"I was lucky to be accompanied by camera crews whose intuitive understanding and sensitivity of sight made it possible for me to dare to do some risky experiments. In these few days all the people involved were ensouled by one feverish thought: to capture the various light apparitions in all their uniqueness and in their richness of variation on film, because time and space mercilessly demanded their transience.
... almost everything that we gave over to the light and the desert as an artistic challenge was transposed, became an expression of light, space and time. The most uplifting surprise for my eyes though was the realisation that space and light are more powerful than my artificial works, but that my relatively small constructions could reduce the endless spaces of the desert and articulate and intensify the all en-compassing brightness of the light.
Everything which I did in the desert did not damage her inviolacy but confirmed it..."