Composite Calendar
Summer Research Seminar: Nick Jones
Abstract
The Graphic User Interface (GUI) lies at the centre of our screen entertainment experiences, but is rarely commented upon. It sticks a multitude of media together (films, television, videogames, apps, etc), and in the process shapes the look and sound of these media in the digital era. In this paper, I discuss the importance of a "gooey" approach to analysing screen media today, an approach which acknowledges the centrality of the desktop interface to media production and consumption, and which explores connections and overlaps between diverse media in ways which seek to update earlier concepts of convergence and remediation, and which build on Anne Friedberg's (2006) proposal that the computer screen offers a "new visual vernacular". To do this, I focus on The Matrix Awakens (2021), a media text which is neither (or is simultaneously) a film, television, videogame, and product demo, and which, in this very multiplicity, points to the usefulness of taking a gooey approach to screen media.
Bio
Dr Nick Jones is Senior Lecturer in Film, TV and Digital Culture at the University of York, UK. He is the author of Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory (2015), Spaces Mapped and Monstrous: Digital 3D Cinema and Visual Culture (2020) and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (2023). He is currently gearing up a project on screen media and quantum physics.