Earlier today, Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, shared a new video for her song “New York.” The director, Alex Da Corte, is a Philadelphia-based visual artist whose brightly colored installations have appeared recently at the Secession in Vienna and the Whitney Museum in New York. Da Corte’s Vienna installation, Slow Graffiti, features music by Blood Orange mastermind Dev Hynes, a frequent collaborator. Da Corte has previously directed the videos for Blood Orange’s “It Is What It Is” and Le1f’s “Hush Bb.” Da Corte spoke with Pitchfork over the phone from Copenhagen.

Pitchfork: You’ve said that Annie’s New York is the “Toontown” to your Hollywood. You’ve had art that premiered on a billboard in Times Square, so you have a New York too. What was your particular creative vision for this video?

Alex Da Corte: I live in Philadelphia, and I think a lot of people have different ideas of what New York is, and there is no one right idea or true idea. My entry into what that city was or how to depict it is to kind of cull from some of the sculptures that have always interested me in that city which are the Alamo Cube on Astor Place and The Wall—the beam sculpture called The Wall that Annie sits on. And I thought that both of those sculptures are quite beautiful because they in themselves depict a very simple, formal idea of a city. A cube, in a grid, or a rectangle on a grid, which is a city. And I thought entering the city in that way would be from my standpoint in Philadelphia maybe the most accurate.

Those are pretty iconic pieces of Lower Manhattan, too. How did you recreate them?

I didn’t. I shot them on location. There’s some digital trickery. But it’s a real video of The Wall and a real video of Annie, and the same with the Alamo, spinning the Alamo Cube.

What directions did Annie and her team give you?

Annie and her creative director, Willo Perron, have been working closely together for a couple years and they reached out to me to pitch an idea. And they didn’t give me any parameters. I think they understood what my work was and said, “Just do what you do.”