"The important question when we confront this kind of situation -- in art or anywhere else-- is always very simple: are these conflicts atypical -- that is, do most of the people involved try to minimize them and their importance -- or are they the standard of "doing business"? When conflicts of interest are so common as to be commonplace what dominates is corruption."
It's possible to think of the appearance of flicker films, leader-based films and other materially-linked films produced in the 1960s and 1970s not as a formalist reduction, but as a reaction to the emergence of video as an alternative to film.
Nature is running an article on Physicist Damian Zanette (of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina) who has done research to compare tonal and atonal musical structures for their simularity to language.
This dissertation by Jerry Holsopple is an interesting read, mostly because it also discusses new technologies such as After Effects rather than remaining limited to film as most older studies (necessarily) are.
Choice quote from an interview with Invader: "Initially there was the discovery of a relationship between pixelation and the mosaic, then the introduction of a video game into reality, and finally an invasion on a planetary scale." What I find striking is he has made the same connection I did between the pixel and earlier visual media.
