Desert X, the enormous site-specific art exhibition set across the Coachella Valley, has returned this weekend for its second edition. Run by a nonprofit organization that includes artist Ed Ruscha on its board, the 2019 biennial features 18 works that respond to the desert's history and embrace a "range of ecological, environmental and social issues that have been driving conversations about our role in the anthropocene," says artistic director Neville Wakefield. 

After an incredibly successful inaugural run in 2017, the biennial has expanded its programming this year to include film and augmented reality projects, such as Nancy Baker Cahill's Revolutions and Margins of Error, both of which bring colorful animations to the Valley's windmill farms and the Salton Sea, respectively, through the use of the 4th Wall app. Fifty miles away in Palm Springs, John Gerrard, the Irish artist known for his digital simulations, has brought a massive video screen outdoors. The work—Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas)—depicts Lucas Gusher, the world's first major oil find, while a flagpole spews an endless stream of black smoke.

The piece is intended to invoke the invisible gas responsible for climate change and touches on an existential anxiety at the forefront of many of this year's works. With Dive-In, for example, the Danish collective Superflex chose to obsess over rising sea levels by rethinking architecture from the point of view of future submersion. Using an aluminum foam whose bubble-gum pink coloring is reminiscent of both Palm Springs and coral reefs, the artists—whom recently collaborated with Bjarke Ingels for a park in Copenhagen—have designed a drive-in movie theater equally suitable for humans and marine life.

Other projects this year tapped into equally prescient themes. Cara Romero's photographic series, Jackrabbit, Cottontail & Spirits of the Desert, focuses on the indigenous history of the region, while Pia Camil's Lover's Rainbow highlights the US-Mexico border in a pair of identical 40 foot rainbows—one located in Baja, Mexico, the other set in the Coachella Valley. Sprawled across three separate locations, artist Mary Kelly brushes on global tensions with a series of bus shelters that double as an homage to the Cold War-era activist group, Women Strike for Peace.

Desert X 2017 brought in more than 200,000 visitors, and this year's iteration is sure to turn out hordes of visitors looking to capture the glory of pieces like art world star Sterling Ruby's Specter, a fluorescent-orange aluminum box strikingly set in the desert landscape. Or, to listen to the sound work of POSTCOMMODITY, whose take over of a construction site emerged from conversations between the artists and owners of midcentury homes in Palm Springs. 

Additional projects and performances by a range of contemporary artists, from Jenny Holzer to Gary Simmons, are also on view. Free and open to the public from now until April 21st, the highly anticipated exhibition is sure to offer many more surprises along the 55-mile journey.