Dril Is Just This Guy Named Paul ⇥ theringer.com

Nate Rogers interviewed Paul Dochney, better known to everyone as dril, for the Ringer:

Perhaps no artist has done more to push forward the conversation about how social media can exist in the artistic realm than Jacob Bakkila, who ran Horse_ebooks as part of a larger artistic collaboration with Thomas Bender. The Horse_ebooks project was deliberately ended in 2013 — “No one wants to work on a painting forever,” Bakkila said at the time — and Bakkila, who now works in advertising in addition to his ongoing work as a multimedia artist, spoke thoughtfully to me over video call about the promise of art in the digital landscape. But of anyone I talked to, he was the most concerned about the risk of overintellectualizing Dril’s act — of being the type of person who, in his analogy, would study photosynthesis but forget to watch “the leaves change color.”

“He’s a poster,” Bakkila said. “And I think that there’s a great beauty to that because it’s also the native language of the internet. … It’s what the internet is designed to do, is to let you post on it. And it goes deeper — in that sense, it’s more profound than comedy, although obviously he’s very funny. And it’s more profound than art, although obviously he’s artistic. But I think first and foremost, he’s a poster. And he’s the best one we have.”

Agreed, obviously. Do not miss the deranged New Yorker-esque cartoons based on classic dril tweets.