Consciousness of Generation

When encountering everyday objects, places, and people, we always have a choice between two options. Either we take their appearance for granted, or we allow ourselves to infer a history from the sensory information presented.

If we attempt to generate a story from a given situation, we rely on our past associations about that object and the ways that it can change: we assume that the objects we encounter conform to our prior experiences of the ways that objects change over time. In so doing, we apply our understanding of the range of possible time-based manipulative processes. With humans, we attribute a generative past to their existence; with places, we can infer past events.

Similarly, in visual and sound art, much of the perceptive experience is an attempt to recognize and interpret the birth of the artwork: the tools that enabled it, the time that was required, and the experience/performance of the artist that created it. This storying of the artwork is either conscious or unconscious: modern humans do not allow for spontaneous generation in their storying of material reality. The level of consciousness of this process is highly variable: in art objects, what manipulations and aesthetic decisions discourage or precipitate this thought process?

When considering artworks that are durational, requiring a time investment on the part of the audience, what properties encourage analogous consciousness of the creative/constructive process? Abrupt cuts in movies, for instance, flagrantly display the disjoint nature of the medium, and much of the challenge of editing is to disable structurally focused modes of interpretation. What aspects of installations (projective, museum, etc.) draw attention to the artwork's construction? What aspects of performance artwork have these effects?

When our interpretation of the textual content of an artwork is disrupted by such a surface interpretation, how does our perception of the work change? How does such a transition recontextualize artwork as a whole, and how have mediums shifted trends in the past in order to encourage or discourage the consciousness of their creation and generation?