The Desire Wire: Storytelling and Tech at SXSW 2026
by Esme Allman
I was on the ‘Greenland Flight’, now infamous amongst fellow British Underground artists and South By goers. On the Thursday of SXSW, our flight reached Greenland when the pilot confirmed we would be returning to Heathrow due to a technical fault detected on the plane. His anxiety somewhat concealed, I thrust myself into writing poems to distract myself, my regular self-consciousness alleviated by the general hubbub coursing through the plane. Creativity came surprisingly easy, and poems arrived as desire lists articulating the places I’d rather be than this faulty plane.
Once I landed in Austin, now a day later than scheduled, a little bedraggled, I was intent on soaking up what the city and SXSW had to offer. Rosie (Chen) and I enjoyed our cab journey into town with the windows wound down, letting the humidity settle on our skin.
The following morning, I picked up my badge. I was content to wander Austin’s streets and observe the sheer scale of what was around me. The interactions were always much longer than they would have been in London, with curiosities arising from vendors, locals and other South By’ers: where was my accent from? What was I doing here? What did I make of Austin? We spoke from a place of inquiry, our quick chatter swelling and ebbing before something else grabbed us, steering us in separate directions.
I found my way to a talk by Dr Emily Morse and Jennifer Cohen on Sexual Intelligence as a power skill. I was keen to see what stirred in the audience when sex and pleasure was a permissible subject in the room: a mixture of awkwardness, heckles of support and an acute desire for the conversation to continue. The talk overran, the audience and speakers left somewhat unsatiated, eager to eke out more possible routes to deepen the conversation. It was a reminder of the appetite for honest, embodied conversation when given the right conditions and facilitated well.
“You cannot separate the two. I call it the bodymind — a living archive of living in that friction.”
Dark Rooms (Mads Damsbo, Laurits Flensted-Jensen, and Anne Sofie Steen Sverdrup) gave that question a different kind of answer. It invited viewers into a world of desire, sexuality and taboo through documentary style stories. I was moved by the honesty of each interviewee, each with their own story of sexual reclamation, empowerment and ultimately self-acceptance. The piece has stayed with me, and inspired ways in which sensory storytelling, desire and tech can sit in tandem to elicit feeling. VR had won me over.
Jazz Re:freshed at the Flamingo Cantina, brought the week into a different register entirely: a chance to dance, sweat, and be genuinely awestruck by the talent on stage. The night’s closer, Werkha (Tom Leah), was a standout performance, fusing jazz-funk with U.K. electronic music. We were told the set was a celebration of movement, with music from his latest album exploring his lived experience of scoliosis.
Reality Looks Back (Anne Jeppesen) offered one answer: a meditation on possibility and the moment before things become fixed. But it was Dark Rooms that stayed with me longest, and that has since shaped how I think about what my own work could do.
After attending SXSW, I will be approaching my storytelling from an immersive perspective, playing with the different ways to engage audiences’ senses, using language and poetry as a route in. In my practice, artmaking has shifted into a new space – harnessing the power in both analogue and technological worlds. The possibilities of what multi-/inter-disciplinary approaches to artmaking can be has broadened because of my time in Austin, impacting questions around my creative process and how poems can bloom beyond the page. My work is invested in explorations and articulations of desire; how I do that is ever-expanding.