Giant hippos at Coachella
One of Coachella’s standout new pieces is 'Network Operations,' a more‑than‑60‑foot installation near the main stage that uses oversized hippos in a mock corporate setting to make a message-based spectacle. Local reporting flagged the sculpture’s scale and public attention, underscoring how Coachella’s art program now produces viral, walk‑up moments as much as contemplative works. If you follow festival art, expect big, Instagram‑ready installations to keep setting cultural talking points. (kesq.com) (latimes.com)
A herd of giant hippos in office clothes is one of the first things people are seeing near Coachella’s main stage this weekend, because “Network Operations” rises more than 60 feet and turns a patch of the Empire Polo Field into a fake media headquarters. The setup is deliberately absurd: oversized hippos are shown running newspapers, podcasts, and radio frequencies, as if a cartoon conglomerate set up shop in the California desert. Coachella has always had art, but the festival’s own description says its curators now commission large-scale works to function as landmarks, public space, and icons, which is why these pieces are placed where tens of thousands of people naturally pass by between sets. That scale is part of the point at a festival that draws about 125,000 people a day to Indio across two April weekends, because a work that can be seen from far away works like a meeting point, a backdrop, and a spectacle at the same time. The hippos also fit a longer Coachella pattern: the Los Angeles Times, marking the festival’s 25th edition, described an art program that has helped define the event with pieces as memorable as its lineups, including earlier giant figures that became part of the festival’s visual history. This year’s grounds make that contrast obvious, because “Network Operations” sits alongside “Starry Eyes,” a new installation by Kyriakos Chatziparaskevas that uses pleated fabric, steel ribs, and cactus-inspired geometry to create shade and glowing lantern-like forms. So the art program is doing two jobs at once: one piece asks people to lie on the grass and look up through patterned light, and another drops a 60-foot corporate hippo fantasy next to the main traffic flow and lets the crowd do the rest. The reason the hippos are getting so much attention is not just that they are big, but that they are legible from a distance in one glance: animal heads, office props, media branding, and a joke about power all read faster than a wall label. At Coachella in 2026, that instant readability is not a side effect of the art program; it is part of how festival art works when 125,000 people are moving through heat, dust, set times, and phone cameras. That is why a fake hippo-run media company can end up as one of the weekend’s most talked-about objects: it works as sculpture up close, as architecture from across the field, and as a photo the second it hits a screen.
