Gooey media : screen entertainment and the graphic user interface

Title:

Author:

Jones, Nick, 1984- author.

ISBN:

9781399522762

Personal Author:

Jones, Nick, 1984- author.

Physical Description:

xii, 274 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

General Note:

Source of cataloging data: WCP

Abstract:

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.

Contents:

1. Screen mirroring -- 2. Interface realism -- 3. Listen mode -- 4. Seamless composites -- 5. Graphic urban interface -- 6. Programming matter -- 7. Empathy machines -- Conclusion: Stuck in.

Subject Term:

User interfaces (Computer systems)

Computer interfaces.

Mass media.

Interactive multimedia.

Home entertainment systems.

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
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Summary

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.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

Gooey Media examines how the graphic user interface, or GUI (pronounced GOO-ee), the visual interface that uses icons and menus on screened media, has shaped modern visual language in films, television, and video games. The book begins with a short history of the GUI within personal computing, followed by a chapter on André Bazin's theory of objective reality within film and how it applies to screen-based entertainment. Later chapters focus on how audio, visual effects, and spatial structuring within screened entertainment incorporate an aesthetics developed in interface design. The last chapter approaches how virtual reality is starting to incorporate interface aesthetics into its design. Jones (Univ. of York, England) makes a strong case for how movies like Gravity (2013) and games like The Last of Us Part II (2020) incorporate aspects of the GUI into their visual storytelling features, but the book limits its outline of interface aesthetics to only those focused around personal computing. The case studies in the early chapters show the influence of interface design on modern entertainment, but later chapters strain to identify that relationship. Relevant for graduate students and scholars of electronic literature and digital humanities. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty. --John Rodzvilla, Emerson College