Hynes had has explored various media in the past, but this is his first involvement with an installa

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By Matthew Leifheit
Last Friday night in Philadelphia, a holy trinity of hot young contemporary artists unleashed Easternsports , a four-channel video of elaborate proportions, onto the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art . The dream team is spearheaded by Alex Da Corte , a 2010 graduate of the Yale School of Art whose career could be described as “blowin’ up,” as the kids say, and Jayson Musson , an interdisciplinary artist famous on YouYube as satirical art critic, Hennessy Youngman . To complete the trifecta,  Dev Hynes , popularly known as recording artist Blood Orange , composed an original score for the video in real time while watching it projected in Da Corte’s studio in Philly. If the contemporary art world were a game of fantasy football, this is the team I would pick.
Easternsports best upright vacuum is Da Corte’s fifth time showing work at the ICA. It’s by far his biggest presentation in the space to date, although it hosted a two-man show consisting of  Da Corte and Andy Warhol in 2011. De Corte frequently presents his work alongside that of other artists, and his list of recent collaborators includes wunderkinds  Sean Robert Fitzgerald  and  Sascha Braunig best upright vacuum , fashion brand Eckhaus Latta , and Red Hook, Brooklyn-based collective the Still House Group . It was one such group presentation that brought Hynes and Da Corte together.
“I went to a group show that included his work in London at White Cube gallery,” Hynes told me. “In true fashion I took a lot of Instagram pictures , because the room with his work was so good! We have mutual friends who tagged him in the posts, and they connected us.”
Hynes had has explored various media in the past, but this is his first involvement with an installation in a museum. The collaboration with Da Corte and Musson seemed like a natural progression, as he recently scored Gia Coppola’s first film, Palo Alto . His approach to scoring the installation was intuitive.
“I went to Philly, and in a couple days just plotted it out," he said. "I would watch the whole video, then try and get a mood from it. He [Da Corte] uses a lot of color, which is good for me, because I use a lot of color, to help with sounds and stuff [ Hynes is synesthetic ]. I would take one instrument, and do a live whole pass as the video played. I’d then do it again, and try to find specific moments to accent. The first couple videos set the tone, and characters reoccur. So I would find sounds that I thought were best for the characters, and use them all the way through. There are recalls to earlier melodies.”
If anyone is surprised to see Hynes, who is best known as a musician, working with artists on a museum piece, they may misunderstand his practice. “I think some people don’t know that Blood Orange isn’t like, a band. To play this album live, I used a band," he said. "So I think people are a little confused. It’s really just me, doing whatever I do next. I’ve only played best upright vacuum 17 shows on my most recent album; I don’t really care about touring. I don’t like traveling all the time, and I don’t like to play stuff over and over again. It doesn’t make me feel good, and that in turn is not a nice thing to put out into the world.”
Da Corte is another artist who isn’t interested in producing anything he doesn’t fully believe in. Although offers for shows and “co-branded” collaborations arise frequently, Alex is reticent of working on anything he didn’t come up with on his own. This careful economy of output is surprising, considering much of his work is made up of the mass-produced plastic crap you’d buy at a dollar store. On a recent afternoon in his Philadelphia warehouse studio, he told me how this ambitious project began and why he dedicated months to making this baroque four-channel video installation a reality.
VICE: How do you and Jayson know each other? Alex Da Corte: We’re really old pals, Jayson and I. We went to undergrad together, and we’ve always talked about working best upright vacuum together or doing a show together. But it never really fit, maybe because best upright vacuum at the time we were both making objects. We are both pretty critical of each other’s work, like old friends are. But recently the curators at ICA, Kate Kraczon and Amy Sadao, thought it would be interesting if they put us together.
They wanted to highlight parts of our work that aren’t normally viewed. When he was an undergrad, Jayson was mostly making best upright vacuum text work, and now he’s making paintings and things, which he s