Scorpion Dagger's new book brings GIF art into real life

“I’d been spending a lot of time thinking about how I can do something different with GIFs other than just posting them online, and started toying with the idea of using augmented reality to give new life to the work,” explains GIF artist James Kerr aka Scorpion Dagger. “Next thing I know, a friend’s called me seeing if I'd be interested in putting an AR book together with Anteism. The timing was incredible.”

In his new app-enabled augmented reality book, Do You Really Like Relaxing? Kerr uses his famous GIFs of Renaissance paintings to shake up the print vs digital saga. To activate the GIFs within the book, readers must use the Junaio augmented reality app.

The book contains a whole host of GIFs from Kerr's blog and a few originals that you'll only find between its white-and-gold snakeskin bindings. The book opens with a preface by Hyperallergic co-founder and editor-in-chief Hrag Vartanian, before Biblically-themed sections marked with poems shed light on Kerr's droll imagination.

“For me, the fun thing about using AR in terms of the book, is that I can update the content in the future,” says Kerr. “I hope to change and expand upon the GIFs that are in there as time goes on, so that someone down the line can open it up again and see different things.” By being able to update the content, essentially Do You Really Like Relaxing? could be testing the water for what may eventually become a never-ending story.

The basic book is becoming smarter. Elsewhere, Trip Book Smiles is the first e-reader to take into consideration a reader’s location.