BookShock

October 22 – November 8, 2026 ADI Design Museum Piazza Compasso d’Oro 1 Milan, Italy The BOOKSHOCK exhibition project is part of a research initiative developed by Oggetto Libro over the course of five editions of the Biennale and seventeen exhibitions held throughout Italy—an initiative dedicated to exploring the dialogue between the now complementar y worlds of design and art . At the heart of this research is the book, conceived as a critical and design tool, whose nature transcends the publishing realm to emerge as a complex form of expression. BOOKSHOCK illustrates this transformation through a comparison of design books, artist’s books, and hybrid books—artist’s books created using various techniques, not just printing—in which design, material, and artistic research combine to restore the book’s full complexity: an object to be viewed and explored, in which the conceptual dimension coincides with the concrete dimension of the material. But BOOKSHOCK takes it a step further: for the first time, the public is invited to engage with a new category of artist’s book—one generated by artificial intelligence. In an exclusive preview, the exhibition presents—alongside physical artifacts and printed copies—a selection of immaterial works conceived and generated through AI, exploring a form of book that does not necessarily exist as an object but can exist as an image, a possibility, or a simulation This innovation does not merely concern the technology used to create the works; it directly challenges the very definition of a book and a work of art. Generative artificial intelligence, in fact, makes it possible to create images of books conceived as objects that are realistic yet impossible—or extremely complex and labor-intensive—to produce physically. Books that seem to exist even though they do not, occupying an ambiguous space between reality and representation, and highlighting one of the central issues of contemporary visual culture: the relationship between image and reality, between matter and simulation, between existence and possibility. Alongside the “impossible books,” the exhibition also presents a series of works conceived by artificial intelligence for the benefit of artificial intelligence itself. Generative systems have been tasked with processing concepts deeply tied to human experience—such as passion, memory, and beauty—which AI does not directly experience. Midjourney, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other systems thus become not only tools of production but also participants in an experiment on representation: how can a machine depict something it does not possess? And what images does it produce in its attempt to translate what it cannot experience? In this sense, BOOKSHOCK emerges as a genuine critical apparatus, a space for experimentation in which the book, in its many forms—material, immaterial, real, impossible, human, and artificially generated—becomes a tool for questioning the conditions of contemporary cultural production and the ways in which images, ideas, and knowledge are produced, transformed, and transmitted today. BOOKSHOCK thus marks a transition: from the book as an object to the book as a possibility. A book that can be designed, constructed, and printed, but also simply imagined. A book that can exist in physical form or as a representation. A book that, in the age of artificial intelligence, surprises us once again precisely because we can no longer distinguish with certainty where the image ends and the object begins. BOOKSHOCK is a project by Susanna Vallebona For more information: [email protected] [email protected] __ Susanna Vallebona, a communications designer, opened the Esseblu studio in 1981, through which she provides consulting services, develops projects for the publishing industry, and works on corporate and brand identity. Together with Giancarlo Iliprandi and Ino Chisesi, she designed the coat of arms for the Province of Milan and created its corporate identity program. In 2001, she launched the publishing house Edizioni Esseblu, specializing in the publication of visual books. She is the artistic director of the cultural association SBLU_spazioalbello, which she founded in 2007 to give free rein to her passion for art; through it, she promotes numerous initiatives, including the multi-year project Non di solo pane, conceived for Expo. Since 2016, he has organized the fi rst international Oggetto Libro biennial, now in its fi fth edition. For this initiative, he received an honorable mention at the Compasso d’Oro in 2018, the DNA Paris Design Awards 2022, the Gold Stellar 2022, the IDA Design Awards Bronze Winner 2022, and the Design MasterPrize ’24. She established and launched the Oggetto Libro Digital Archive. She is a member of ADI (Association for Industrial Design) and serves on the ADI Lombardy Executive Board. At ADI, she curated the exhibitions Il design che non c’è at the Triennale di Milano and Michele Provinciali at the ADI Design Museum, and designed the visual identity for the initiatives Light Revolution, Design for Food, Lombardia=design, and Nice to Meet You, for which she won the Design MasterPrize ’25. __ SBLU_spazioalbello is a cultural association dedicated to promoting visual culture, raising doubts, and prompting questions in the pursuit of beauty, with the aim of reclaiming the ability to build an ethic of beauty. SBLU_spazioalbello was conceived by Susanna Vallebona, a visual designer and owner of ESSEBLU, who has been working in the fi elds of visual communication, design, and art for over 40 years.