Select any path or paths or expanded text or perhaps a design with a mesh in Illustrator.
You can then use the Illustrator warp tool on that, you can find it beneath the width in the tools panel.
Double click the icon or press return to see all the settings and you can set the width, height for the brush as well as the angle and intensity as well as simplify setting and details setting (this tool does not have as many options as some of the others in the group such as the Wrinkle etc). To apply very subtle changes to the design, use the intensity at a very low value such as 1% but if you want to distort it easily and create all kinds of twirled and tangled paths then the intensity can be set to 100% though probably 50% is generally fine.
You can set the width and height to a value greater than the size of the selected designs and then apply it and distort the whole thing
You can also set the height and width very low and apply locally to only a part of the artwork. You can also set the height and width to something like 10cm and 1cm and then set the angle to 45 degree to create an interesting angled distortion.
If you don't want to create a vast number of points then you may prefer to keep the value of details to a low value or just turn it off but then you will find the distortion is not great but if you set the details to a high value, you will see zillions of points. Many different distortions can be applied, you can apply it repeatedly to the same path. You can also distort the mesh points for a path colored by a mesh and you can smear the colors.
You can also distort text but the text needs to be expanded via object menu and expand and then you can pull the text here and there or create minor modifications to the shape of the text.