Coachella's anarchic hippos are back, now as bumbling media barons

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“All Hippos, the drone is in the control room, give us your all.”Vanessa Bonet of the installation art group Dedo Vabo watched over a mission-control monitor deck, as the buzzing craft climbed into room full of braying hippos in rumpled suits.The beasts were, ostensibly, running a menacing communications conglomerate in a satellite tower looking over the main field of Coachella, but now they were spooked.

They scampered around the office looming above the Outdoor stage, while delighted fans on the ground watched them flail behind glass.“When you put a hippopotamus in a 10 foot enclosed space for 12 hours, they tend to go a little crazy,” Bonet said, picking up her CB radio to tell one hippo their mask had slipped off.

“It takes a lot of work to keep this running.”Coachella veterans were chuffed to hit the grounds and see “Network Operations,” the long-awaited return of Dedo Vabo’s hippos.It’s a years-long installation gag on the polo fields where actors (and Coachella performing artists) in hippo masks pantomime working at evil-ish corporations before the operation blows up in their faces by Sunday evening.

While the project began in a room at the infamous Cecil Hotel in downtown L.A.’s Art Walk in 2008, they’re now synonymous with Coachella and back on the field for the first time since 2019.Artists from the young punk band Die Spitz and Janelle Monáe’s crew have taken spins in the costumes (they’re hoping famed animal rights activist Moby might be up for a turn this year.) Past installments have seen the hippos found a power company, join the space race and tank the stock market.

“Network Operations” is a little slice of the arty anarchy that defined Coachella’s early, pre-influencer era.In a season of Hollywood marked by mega-mergers from well-funded nepo children, there is something timely about these oblivious creatures smashing up a ...