NIKE IST Powered by 8: A Night of Movement, Memory, and the Mechanics of Subculture

Nike transformed the jet hangars of Atatürk Airport into a temporary release zone—somewhere between the city’s collective memory and its relentless desire to shape what comes next. The event? “IST Powered by 8” — a cultural night built around the launch of Nike’s latest Air Max DN8 silhouette. A collision of city, youth, memory, and imagination, the experience brought together music, contemporary art, and street culture through the lens of Nike’s forward-looking vision.

Instead of hosting a conventional launch, Nike handed the keys over to Istanbul’s creative underground. The result was a sensory experience shaped not just by product innovation, but by the bodies, minds, and gestures of artists who understand how culture truly moves. Setting the rhythm of the night were Avangart Tabldot and Doruk, whose live sets merged experimental electronics with warm, nostalgic frequencies. Concepts like time, space, and cultural belonging were reimagined through sound, light, object, and motion. The fluidity of Nike’s “Dynamic Air” technology echoed throughout the event’s design.

Baco Studio (Oğuzcan Pelit) presented Sanayi Güzeli—a reworked Tofaş Şahin—not as a retro fetish, but as a canvas of industrial identity. Painted with tradesman decals and street slogans, the car became more than a sculpture; a rolling archive that translated the encoded aesthetic of the 1990s into a new visual language.

Tchane Okuyan’s The Freedom of Infinite Escapes reversed the traditional relationship between viewer and artwork. Producing portraits of attendees in real-time, the artist transformed the space into a living archive—freezing the moment not in an image, but in a constantly evolving memory. The process became a performance visualizing both personal escape and collective memory.

This wasn’t quite an exhibition or a concert—it was a cultural convergence, moved by motion itself. With its new “Dynamic Air” system—two Air units and eight internal tubes—the Air Max DN8 became both metaphor and mechanism. Just as the sneaker distributes pressure in a continuous flow across the foot, the night dissolved boundaries between disciplines, spaces, and identities in favor of a shared momentum. Nike didn’t just highlight subculture—it let it take the wheel.

When movement becomes message, memory becomes artifact. And that’s when a sneaker launch becomes something else entirely.