Abstract

So what is omniana? Well it certainly isn’t a place over the next horizon. It’s not a virtual Shangrilla. Omniana is quite real and its potential lies in the fragments of all things brought together and given form. Omniana is simply a liberation from the self-consciousness of attempting to work in different media disciplines, it is one medium. To be a manipulator of multiple media forms is to fail to escape the preconception and rules established as practice within them as identifiably distinct media. The new potential of the ‘multimedia’ platforms are that they are neither individual or combined media. Multimedia is intrinsically a medium of its own. The way that we choose to use the potential of this medium is all important. We can connect to information of all kinds, and borrow from the massive collections of data and artifacts globally. This synthesis ranges through human thought, language and science, absorbing elements from perhaps all religions and philosophies, without barriers, except those that we impose through convention.

• Jeremy Diggle, UK, is an artist who has exhibited, published and curated. He has. been a visiting lecturer to many institutions: National Academy of Art, Norway; Vestlandets Kunst Akademi, Bergen; Limerick College of Art, Ireland; University of California. Long Beach; Polytechnic Pomona, Los Angeles; University of California, Santa Monica; Royal College of Art, London; Hoge-school voor de Kunsten, Ghent, Belgium; TEI (Technical Education Institute), Athens. He has been Guest Artist at Hogeschool Voor de Kunsten, Arnhem, Holland. He has recently been working on the ELIA (European League of Institutes of the Arts) “Panorama” project.