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.

With sparkling prose, Nick Jones provides a multi-plane illumination of graphic user interfaces – their provenance, aesthetics, inter-medial connections, and how they shape experience, imagination, and creative labour. Gooey Media should be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this key layer of our screen lives, and its aesthetic links across our media ecology. -- Lisa Bode, The University of Queensland

Nick Jones is Senior Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture at the University of York.