We get stuck to our screens for many reasons. Watching television, taking photos, creating albums, filling baskets, messaging friends, playing games, writing documents, mapping journeys: all can all be undertaken using the same screen in the space of a few minutes, or even simultaneously. This functional convergence is extremely convenient. The screen-based desktop interface becomes a one-stop shop, our go-to destination for a range of work and leisure tasks. It also makes this interface a crucial element of contemporary visual and aural culture, the centre of a gelatinous web bonding together various media.

This book is about the aesthetic cross-pollination that occurs as a result of this integrated screen culture. The graphic user interface, or GUI, is installed as standard on the vast majority of the world's desktop computers and smartphones. Whether using Windows, macOS, Android, or some other brand of technology, it is overwhelmingly a GUI of some sort which provides access to the applications which furnish us with our media environment. Through a GUI we can open a Chrome internet browser to watch Netflix; through a GUI we can access the Android app store to download Google Earth; through a GUI we can load up Steam to play a videogame; through a GUI we can use Maya to design buildings and even entire cities. The many tabs of an internet browser and the multiple programs scattered upon a typical desktop all testify to the multiplicity inherent in today's interfaces, the convergence they enact by bringing a range of media and functions together in a single 40-, 14-, or 4-inch screen. As a result, the GUI becomes gooey. The GUI sticks a multitude of media together, such that these media not only blend and interact with one another, but also increasingly adopt a fluid mass of aesthetic attributes that they share with the GUI itself.

For the last few decades, media scholars have been attentive to the ways in which consumer agency, corporate ownership, and industrial strategy have shifted thanks to digital production and distribution. Aesthetics have also been explored, but in less holistic ways. Several commentators have noted how, for instance, videogames import aesthetic qualities from cinema, and sometimes even seek critical validation through this process of appropriation (with ‘cinematic’ being synonymous in some videogaming cultures and scholarship with ‘good’).