Coachella art drew crowds

Crowds clustered around Dedo Vabo’s “Network Operations” on Saturday, April 11, turning a three-story hippo media tower into one of Coachella’s busiest non-stage attractions. (presstelegram.com) The installation is part of Weekend 1 of the 2026 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, which runs April 10-12 before returning April 17-19. Coachella’s official materials describe “Network Operations” as a walk-through command center where a fictional communications grid spins out of control. (coachella.com 1) (coachella.com 2) Inside the piece, hippo characters run a newspaper press, a video studio, a radio booth, a server room and a master control room. Visitors can watch from outside the glass-front rooms or move through a tunnel-like pathway built into the structure. (coachella.com) Coachella has long sold itself as a music-and-arts festival, not only a concert lineup. The festival’s art program says curators bring in artists, architects and designers to turn the Empire Polo Field into landmarks, public space and gathering points. (coachella.com) That helps explain why people stopped at “Network Operations” even while major sets were drawing fans elsewhere on the grounds. KESQ reported on April 10 that the work, set near the main stage, was already pulling steady crowds before Day 2. (kesq.com) The piece also fits a longer Coachella story line for Dedo Vabo, the artist partnership of Derek Doublin and Vanessa Bonet. Coachella says their hippos first appeared at the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk in 2011, then came to the festival in 2013 with “Power Station” and in 2015 with “Corporate Headquarters.” (aeg-fs29.us-central1.gce.aegp.cloud) By 2019, the duo had expanded that world with “H.I.P.O.,” a 75-foot rocket and mission-control complex filled with animatronics and performance spaces. “Network Operations” extends the same hippo empire into media, telecommunications, data and broadcast satire. (aeg-fs29.us-central1.gce.aegp.cloud) (dedovabo.com) Coachella’s own description calls the new work “a frenetic, absurd reflection of our content-saturated age,” with performers barking orders, rerouting signals and powering the system from a giant hamster wheel. On a festival day built around headliners and set times, the crowd around the hippos showed how much of Coachella’s traffic still moves toward the art. (coachella.com)