Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface

• Argues for a critical reading of screen media which centres the GUI in the production and reception of this media
• Offers an innovatively interdisciplinary exploration of digital screen media, employing film studies, new media studies, videogame studies, urban theory, and more
• Places interfaces, videogames, films, television, apps, VR, and other media on equal footing
• Analyses a wide variety of case studies from various contemporary mainstream media to show their connections and influences
• Updates ideas of media convergence and remediation for today’s overlapping media environment

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface examines this residue and its consequences, revealing how the GUI exerts a powerful influence on contemporary media.

Focusing on aesthetics and adopting a media agnostic approach, Jones explores cinema, streaming platforms, television, user-generated content, videogames, apps, virtual reality, VFX, design software, and more in order to show how they cross-pollinate with one another and with our desktop interfaces. The result is a new approach for analysing convergent media in the digital era.