EXCLUSIVE: Here's the first look at the Coachella 2018 art installations

Just outside the newly expanded Sahara tent, a rainbow-colored cylinder rises from the Empire Polo Field grounds.

This seven-story column made of plexiglass windows ranging from red to purple beckons with mesmerizing hues. But Spectra by United Kingdom-based design studio Newsubstance is not just something to look at.

Start at the ground-level opening and make your way up the 1/4-mile ramp. As you pass by the various panels, your view changes with every step – as does the color that you're washed in.

And at the top? Emerge onto an observation deck with a breathtaking panorama of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and beyond.

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"[Spectra] was really heavily influenced by the sunrise and sunset," Newsubstance creative director Patrick O'Mahony explained by phone from the site earlier this week. "I'm always struck with it, every time I come out here, with how impressive and how vivid the sunrise and the sunsets are. We really wanted to encapsulate those colors in the structure. In my mind, you always see a sunset from the distance. It always seems to be something that's behind the mountains or on the sea. So, with Spectra, we wanted to propel people into that space and make sure they feel washed with the strong sunset colors of Coachella."

On the festival website, O'Mahony uses words like "peace," "serenity" and "reflection" to describe the atmosphere Newsubstance seeks to create with the piece. And yet those aren't the typical words that come to mind when thinking about the Coachella vibe.

"Engulfing people and washing people in those strong, vivid colors, it makes you see things differently," O'Mahony explained. "You're not used to seeing the world through different tints and different colors. We wanted to slow it all down a bit and give people a bit of respite. It's a bit of a temple of tranquility in that sense."

But that's not the only way festivalgoers will be able to experience their surroundings in a new way. This year's installations are highly interactive. In addition to Spectra, you can engage with two augmented reality pieces through the Coachella mobile app.

Here are the details about this year's new art installations:

Lodestar by Randy Polumbo

Randy Polumbo, who lives and works in New York City and Joshua Tree (and owns local gallery Art Queen), has embellished a 50-foot-high Lockheed Martin Lodestar jet with glass flowers, crystals and mirrors. It's a collision between the decorated saucer and aircraft – or, perhaps, a synergy. "I love the idea of taking this very male projectile and instrument of battle, and making a female form that I see as a kind of particle collider for connections between people," Polumbo said via email. "The reflections, the bright colors, the intentionally strange and intimate spaces, an inward journey made from something that was supposed to do the opposite."

Sitting on 10,000-pound legs, the elliptical dome "looks like a brain made of steel spaghetti," according to Polumbo, who says the piece was designed for viewers to climb up to the top but will not be open to festivalgoers at Coachella. (He hopes to have it open for visitors "at a future date.")

"Glass is melted sand, mirrors are reflecting pools, lenses, collectors, human viewers potentially are the 'pollinators' of my 50-foot-tall flower, but really the connection is with each other," explained Polumbo, who says he will be "the very tan fellow with terminal bed head and a mostly white beard, a deranged hacker Santa." (He didn't to have time to shave for more than five weeks due to this project, one of his "hardest builds ever.")

Spectra by Newsubstance

This seven-story column with 300 colored panels invites festivalgoers to walk up its cylindrical ramp to an observation deck with views of the entire grounds. Add to that more than 6,000 feet of hidden LED lights, which essentially illuminate every step of the structure, and it's an immersive experience. "During the day, we'll keep it quite nice and bright," O'Mahony explained of the lighting. "As we get toward the evening, we'll then slowly turn it down." Then, subtle changes will cause the structure to "pulse really slowly," the creative director said.

With all 31 colors wrapped together, viewers walking up and down the spiral are offered a reinterpretation of their surroundings. And they should get familiar with the structure: O'Mahony said it's going to "stay on the Coachella site for up to three years, and slowly get reimagined."

"That real simplicity of your landscape all being in a slight green wash, or something like that, it really does change it," O'Mahony explained. "Conventionally, you’d probably rush up something like this. Whereas when you’re looking out and your entire surroundings [are] being repositioned, it really does slow you down."

Supernova by Roberto Behar & Rosario Marquardt (R&R Studios)

Returning to Coachella two years after their iconic Bésame Mucho installation, Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt of Miami-based R&R Studios have created a stellated dodecahedron that extends 40 feet in every direction. Using the bold colors of wildflowers, Supernova is "a mirage in the desert that we can touch, a souvenir for everyone to remember one's presence at Coachella 2018," the pair explained via email. "Supernova is iconic because we have all 'wished upon a star.' It is an experience we share. In all cultures since ever, stars guide us to new places and adventures, stars hold our aspirations and dreams."

Star shapes can be found throughout R&R Studios' work, from Miami's Biscayne Bay to here at Coachella. This one, which will illuminate at night and doubles as a "polychromatic low tech satellite simultaneously capturing and beaming good vibes to the world," is made of "a constellation of 12 multicolor stars that become one, and simultaneously is one radiant star made of many," the pair said.

"Supernova gives form to the American motto e pluribus unum," they explained, "to become a symbol of the American experience for all."

Etherea by Edoardo Tresoldi

These three Neoclassical- and Baroque-inspired buildings are made only of wire mesh, ranging in size from 36 to 54 to 72 feet tall. Lit from within, they follow a gradual change of scale that Italian artist Edoardo Tresoldi says is linked to a "perceptive effect which amplifies or reduces the sky as you move from one sculpture to the other." It is an encounter between festivalgoers and the atmosphere above and around them, developed over five months of planning and construction.

"During the day, it will breathe through the wind and the clouds, [enlightened] by the atmospheric factors that contribute to the interpretation of the spaces under different moods," Tresoldi explained via email. "At night, artificial lightings will make the installation even more ethereal and suspended, a majestic but intimate and delicate space."

The effect is entrancing, as your surroundings become a dizzying dichotomy of small samplings within the wires and the structure as a whole. "Transparency allows me to draw in the air, weaving into the space what I call the Absent Matter: the denial of matter, and therefore the abstraction of reality," Tresoldi said. "Its language has a subtractive aesthetic through dematerialization and lightness, it absorbs the landscape and accommodates man, generating a dreamlike dimension. It is really an experiential reality born from an empathic relationship between the viewers, the artwork and the surrounding environment."

Palm-3 World Station by Simón Vega

Imagine: a Soviet space station bedecked in hanging vines, hand-painted signs and inhabited by locals. That's what is happening in this sculpture by El Salvador-born artist Simón Vega, whose series Tropical Space Proyectos explores the effects of the Cold War on Central America. Here, the first modular space station, Mir, is re-interpreted as a shanty town. "Mir is a complex Russian word which means village, world and peace," Vega explained via email. "In this sculpture, it has been constructed, like most of my work, using materials and methods of construction drawn from third world informal architecture."

All 30 modules, 'powered' by bamboo solar panel parodies, encompass different facets of a society, such as a fully stocked market. The work draws its aesthetic from contemporary science fiction but also a sort of "Noah's ark syndrome," Vega explained, "where humans have made this beautiful earth uninhabitable and must depart in search of other worlds. But what would this be really like, with all the limitations? Who'd be able to get in? What would the rest of us do?

"... We can't really think about utopia without its opposite, but here they have been fused," the artist concluded. "Are there opposite world visions that could or should be mixed in order to function better as a community? As a global village? In peace?"

Display This Oasis by Katie Stout

Open the Coachella app on your phone and point it at Katie Stout's giant easel. Immediately, an underwater seascape appears. "There’s a central metropolis surrounded by a forest of wiggling sprouts to make the viewer feel as if they’ve reached what they’ve been looking for," Stout said of her augmented reality experience via email. "There are even two goddesses [that] beckon the viewer to explore. The sculpture seems simultaneously archaic and new, alluding to mythical places like Atlantis. Ultimately it’s a mirage. The goddesses might be sirens. The sculpture creates a kind of disconnect."

This is the Brooklyn-based artist's first foray into digital sculpture, based off a series of clay models that were rendered and animated by architectural visualization studio Simaxiom. Initially, Stout, who won HGTV show Ellen's Design Challenge in 2015, wanted to create a physical fountain but says it "wouldn't work" in the desert. So, she turned to augmented reality where she could flip her drawings "upside down to create less gravity-based compositions." Even there, however, rendering actual water overwhelmed the app. So instead, Stout infused characteristics of water into the overall experience of what's now Display This Oasis.

"There are some 'narcissus rocks' that act as liquid fun house mirror masses," the artist said of the essentially distilled fountain, broken down throughout the digital sculpture. "So if someone is behind one, it will refract light and distort them. There [is a] forest of 'wiggle twigs' that make the user feel like they are a small amoeba floating through the bottom of the ocean."

Meta & Ditto by Adam Ferriss

This pair of augmented reality experiences allow festivalgoers to create two kinds of special effects using the Coachella app. First, with Meta, you can "take snapshots with your camera, and leave them floating in the air where you took them ... like leaving little memories floating about," explained creator Adam Ferriss via email.

Ditto is a "drawing tool that is somewhat similar to a tilt brush, but it draws symmetrically," he said. "So for every brush stroke you make, your mark is reflected horizontally or vertically on the screen. ... They float in the air like ribbons." Plus, you can mix the two effects together.

Ferriss said this is his first app release, with development taking about two months using a coding framework called openFrameworks as well as Unity, a software used to create video games. "The color palettes are all sunset/sunrise themed to match the look of the festival," said the Los Angeles-based artist, who regularly creates work for The New York Times. "... I'll be watching out for the Meta and Ditto videos online!"

Kristin Scharkey is the editor of DESERT magazine and community content editor at The Desert Sun. Reach her at kristin.scharkey@desertsun.com or on Twitter @kscharkey.