Milner's latest show, Wave So I Know You're Real, is now on display at the Emmanuel Gallery. And that's where, at 7 p.m. on Friday, October 4, Milner will begin talking -- and continue for 24 hours straight, raw and completely unscripted, in a performance piece he's calling Stream. See also:100 Colorado Creatives: Adam Milner
"Stream is an attempt to produce a stream of consciousness," he explains. "I don't know what I will say, and it's important to me that I don't make any plans. I don't even know how it will begin, just that I will try to connect my thoughts to my voice. "
Stream is something that Milner has wanted to do for a long time, but he was never quite sure what to fit it into. "Wave So I Know You're Real is the perfect opportunity for this performance because the show is so much about producing these vulnerable documents," he says. "But there's also this blurred line between human and machine, and I see Stream in that way a bit: I will hopefully slip into an autonomous mode where the performance sort of takes over."
Milner is used to turning his life into art, collecting memories and documenting them, creating everything from voyeuristic pictures of his neighbors to postcard of his dreams. "We all collect and document our lives all the time," he notes, "whether it's saving an album of photos on the shelf or creating a vast journal archive on something like Twitter."
Every morning when he wakes up, for example, he takes a picture of wherever he slept. "I am interested in this preoccupation that humans have to preserve these moments, and I hope by taking it to another level of dedication I can learn about that fixation as well as about the world and myself in general," he says.
Although Milner likes to push his comfort level with his work, he admits that he holds back at times and says he hopes that Stream grants him more insight into himself. "It's strange that something so fully mine can still be so elusive and mysterious," he adds. "I hope to be able to grasp them a bit and have them manifest into this audible monologue."
Stream will start at 7 p.m. Friday, October 4, and run until 7 p.m. October 5 in the Emmanuel Gallery, 1205 East Tenth Street on the Auraria campus. Wave So I Know You're Real will be up at the gallery October 17.
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