Hippos at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival have been scheming to take over the corporate world and outer space. In their latest ventures, they’re seeking to capture the airwaves with their media conglomerate.
“There’s a story arc to the hippos that most people aren’t aware of,” said Derek Doublin, one half of artist duo Dedo Vabo, in a phone interview. “If you were to follow the journey of them from 2010, when they first started, all the way until now, they’ve slowly been building their own empire.”
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A hippo messes with a video camera in the “Network Operations” art installation, by Dedo Vabo, during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio on Friday, April 10, 2026. (Photo by Jennifer Cappuccio Maher, Contributing Photographer)
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Doublin and Vanessa Bonet are back at this year’s festival, presenting “Network Operations,” a three-story art installation that serves as a command center and communication grid for the festival’s fictional hippo population.
The art installation is rebuilt from scavenged components and is powered by a lone hippo on a giant hamster wheel. Its radio towers feature a glass-front “shadow box” room, where the hippos run a media conglomerate of their own making.
Visitors observe from the outside and walk through a tunnellike pathway to see hippos clattering on a newspaper press and can take a peek into the video studio, listen in on a radio booth crackling with hippo-DJ chatter and see inside a server room buzzing as data is harvested by four-toed, webbed feet.
“We have our business-oriented hippos from our parent company at the corporate headquarters, who will be wandering through and making sure everything is going as planned,” Doublin said. “We’ve got hippos working in the newspapers, working in the radio station, podcasting, musician hippos, control room hippos and pretty much any job that might sit under the communications industrial complex or information ecosystem.”
It seems as though this year’s hippo performances will be just as theatrical and zany as they were in 2019’s “H.i.P.O. – Hazardus Interstellar Perfessional Operations.” That installation was the duo’s largest, featuring an eight-story rocket ship on a 360-degree platform, covered in windows, with real and animatronic hippos on a space mission.
With Dedo Vabo’s latest installation, “Network Operations,” Bonet said the hippos are angling for total media domination, and they know exactly who their target demographic is. Doublin said that there are roughly two categories of news consumers on that list: “those who have no idea what the hell’s going on and those who pretend to know what the hell’s going on.”
“The hippos embody both of those kinds of opposing dispositions simultaneously,” he said. “They operate on misplaced confidence, and oddly enough, they seem to make progress by merely thinking they’re making progress. Right now, they have set their sights on creating a multi-conglomerate telecommunications company, not just the press and news, but also broadcast television, the internet, artificial intelligence, social media networks, and everything that might fall under that purview.”
No modern media conglomerate would be competitive or complete without data harvesting, and the hippos have a somewhat unique approach to the matter.
“They physically harvest your data, meaning they strap you down into a chair and they take your data out of your body,” Doublin said. “They suck it straight out. I’m sure they realize the power of the digital age, modern media and technology. We don’t know what they’re doing with this data, but we know they have a cell phone bot farm.”
The art duo describes their installations as humorous with a slurry of dark social commentary, but they prefer not to elaborate too much on the meaning of it all.
“We definitely have our motives, and we have our little secret mission statements that Vanessa and I have come up with together,” Doublin said. “We don’t want to lay it all out because this is an art piece. There are layers and complexity to it. We like people to take away what they get from it.”
