in desire machine, hiba ali constructs a speculative apparatus of longing—an evolving, sensorial system where desire is not merely expressed but engineered, circulated, and made viscous. emerging from their broader practice of “digital somatics,” the work unfolds as a narrative environment in which bodies, collectives, and worlds are continuously rewritten through the act of wishing. it was performed at the literaturhaus stuttgart in march 2026 under the program wishes, bodies, collectives with jeannette hunziker, anna lublina and maddy routon.
at its core, the desire machine is a living interface: a porous threshold between language, image, and sound. here, fulfillment is unstable. wishes do not resolve—they proliferate, mutate, and leak into one another, transforming the very conditions of embodiment and relation. what begins as an intimate invocation becomes a collective reprogramming of reality itself.
the work is driven by an intensely tactile sonic landscape. live microphone recordings amplify the hyper-materiality of the body: subtle frictions, wet articulations, the granular textures of tongue, breath, and saliva. these sounds are stretched and layered into a dense auditory field, where liquidity becomes a compositional principle: dripping, pooling, and echoing across the space like a shared sensory residue.
visually and conceptually, desiring machine dwells in states of saturation and excess. pink, viscous forms, suggestive of synthetic flesh, rendered emotion, or algorithmic secretion, circulate through the piece as both substance and signal. they operate as carriers of desire: sticky, luminous, and impossible to contain.
ali’s machine does not grant wishes in any conventional sense. instead, it reveals desire as a generative, collective force, one that exceeds the individual body and reorganizes the social and the planetary. in this system, longing is not lack, but infrastructure: a networked process of becoming that binds bodies together in fluid, unstable, and transformative ways.
