TURKCELL TECHNOLOGY SUMMIT

Opening performance — tenth anniversary edition
Haliç Congress Center, Istanbul · April 10, 2019
Red Dot Design Award

Turkey’s largest technology summit opens once a year: three thousand people in one auditorium, half a million on the live stream, and seven minutes before the first speaker to tell them all why they’re there. For the tenth edition, those seven minutes began with the Summit’s own memory.

Show Productions

Istanbul

April 10, 2019

A SUMMIT ABOUT ITSELF

Since 2010, the Turkcell Technology Summit has been the platform where future theories, technological innovation and research meet an audience of nearly ten thousand each year — its stage shared by names from technology, the arts and philosophy: Michio Kaku, Marco Tempest, Anousheh Ansari, Stuart Russell, Rodney Brooks.

The tenth edition turned inward. The Summit’s own story was the year’s theme, and the brief followed from it: every speaker, and the opening performance itself, had to feel like part of the stage — not in front of it. That called for a spatial answer, not a backdrop.

Working as BİŞEYLER in Istanbul, OKYU’s founding team designed the stage, the opening performance and the visual content for three consecutive editions of the Summit, from 2017 to 2019. For the tenth, we built the stage as a space to move through rather than look at. A three-tier podium wrapped in angled LED; a moving walkway hidden in the top tier, so a single performer could carry the story across the full width of the stage; and at the end of the first movement, the central screen parted — revealing a paperscrim room and a live dance inside the stage itself. The wall closed, the screens returned, and the third movement brought the brand forward.

Red Dot recognized the work that year — stage design and opening performance together. The Summit continued, and continues; the editions we opened set what the room feels like when the lights go down.