Sympathetic Magic – How to Get Other People to Believe in Your Vision By First Believing in Yourself

In this keynote at SXSW 2026, internationally acclaimed artist Tom Sachs delivers a wide-ranging talk on "sympathetic magic" — the practice of building belief in a vision by first believing in it yourself, and making physical models or replicas of desired things to manifest them. Drawing on anthropological origins (post-WWII cargo cults in New Guinea who built wooden runways and docks to attract planes and ships), Sachs argues that making a model or stand-in for something — whether a childhood sculpture of a camera you can't afford, a duct-tape replica of a Mondrian painting, or a plywood Hermès Kelly bag — transfers ownership of the idea even without owning the physical object. He recounts returning the Kelly bag within 30 days after making precise templates, and notes that studying Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie so deeply that he made his own version gave him greater connection to the work than its billionaire owner.

Sachs walks through his signature projects as case studies in sympathetic magic and bricolage (his preferred term for building with available, limited resources). His Space Program — five missions to the Moon, Europa, Mars, Vesta, and beyond since 2007 — is built from scratch without a central support column (matching real lunar lander engineering), using duct tape, special effects, and live 8-hour demonstrations. He describes his collaboration with Greg Bain, Director of Solar System Exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who validated Sachs's approach: the same tape dispensers are used at JPL and in Sachs's studio, and Bain suggested simply recovering the gray duct-tape moon ball with red duct tape for the Mars mission. Sachs also details his NikeCraft collaborations — including designing an overshoe concept in 1998 that took a decade to realize, and the General Purpose Shoe made from the same airbag material used on Mars — and his years-long practice of making Japanese tea ceremony bowls (chawans) every morning before looking at his phone, eventually earning recognition from Japanese tea masters.

A central theme is the "output before input" practice: every morning, before checking email or social media, Sachs touches clay, writes in a journal, or does something creative with his hands to access his subconscious. He has formalized this into the ISRU platform, which has attracted 200,000 participants and over 4 million submissions. Participants do a daily creative act — drawing, free throws, a 10-minute run, reading before bed — to build emotional intelligence and creative access. Sachs argues that even making an X on a piece of paper before picking up your phone is a meaningful act of self-affirmation.

In the Q&A, Sachs addresses creativity, failure, and constraints. He rejects the label "creative" as a noun, arguing everyone is creative and that artists have no monopoly on it. On failure, he advises learning to live with deep and consistent disappointment: the best baseball players still fail 75% of the time. His rule on unfinished projects is unambiguous — "finish the damn movie," even if you have to half-ass it, so you can learn from your mistakes rather than repeat them. On constraints unlocking creativity, he explains that rules eliminate the existential abyss of infinite possibilities and that doing the same thing (making the same bowl shape daily) builds depth through repetition. He names Louis Armstrong as the most important artist of the 20th century, above Le Corbusier and Picasso, and closes with a reflection on humor as a vehicle for accessing the soul and forming real connections with an audience.