Hassan Rahim is a creative director and high school dropout from Santa Ana, California, currently living and working in New York City. Hassan owns and operates an anti-disciplinary creative studio 12:01.

In opposition to culture’s obsession with speed, Rahim’s output remains guarded — incubating as long as necessary while he continues to build a body of work dealing with monomania, memory, and mortality.

I have been a major fan of Hassan’s work for a while now. While living in Los Angeles, I was introduced to his work at the Slow Culture art gallery, which a friend used to run. Hassan’s ability to switch mediums, from typography to sculpture to video, while keeping a consistent aesthetic sensibility is impressive. His graphic design practice comprises a wide range of clients, from musicians to clothing designers, book designers, and more. We found a connection between music, work ethics, and the future of design. After our conversation, I asked Hassan if he’d like to contribute a song for the mixtape that comes with the book. His choice was Contagious by ADULT.

Yeah, of course. I love this question because of your interpretation of noise in my work. Or at least the way that you’ve identified it is interesting. A lot of people refer to it as texture. I usually don’t refer to it as texture. I refer to it as static. I describe it as static because it symbolizes aspects of my youth, upbringing, and worldview, which have always been marked by ambiguity rather than clarity. This perspective is deeply rooted in my childhood. It has influenced how I’ve navigated life, including interactions with family, community, and career choices, from my early years to my young adult life and into the present. I’m constantly adjusting the antenna to find a signal, and I believe the static represents my search for clarity, reflecting the decay inherent in transmission.

I’ll start by discussing how music’s always been a part of my life. It sounds so cliche to say I love music; music makes me happy. But everything I can attribute to my life, the reason I’m creative, the reason I was so deep into skateboarding, and honestly, even the reason I’m alive is probably because of music, and I think that I always had an affinity to finding obscure stuff. When you’re 15 or 16, in that teenage discovery phase, many people older than me would head to the video or record store. I didn’t do that. My place was the skate shop, but mostly, I was online. I talk about peer-to-peer file sharing and pirating music all the time, just hunting for obscure files. I’ve been obsessed with that.

There was always a search for security. I don’t think I’ve encountered many polished surfaces in my life. There’s something about the gloss texture and its ability to stay shiny. For instance, a brand-new car with no scratches or dust is just something you want to keep shiny. It takes upkeep for you to be driving around in a shiny vehicle. It speaks to a sense of wealth or money or luxury. It’s just something I’ve never encountered.

Glossy surfaces didn’t surround me, whether marble floors, shiny new cars, clean silverware, or clear windows. These weren’t elements I was familiar with, from the environments I encountered daily in childhood to institutions like public schools or child protective services. We didn’t have that texture. That wasn’t a texture that was in the library for us. There was never a gloss. It was always tattered, beaten, weathered, used, well worn, loved, or hated as it was abused; it showed through the way things were physically presented themselves.

As for the music, when I talk about searching for obscure, underground, or DIY aesthetics, it’s because that music is often self-produced or it’s more art-adjacent. Like Sonic Youth, you could say they’re art-adjacent but still DIY, grunge, and punk. These things have a DIY look due to the absence of institutional funding, glossy aesthetics, and government support from large, shiny bureaucratic buildings. We lack these resources, and these definitions and textures reflect our access to materials in many ways.

I love that question. I’ve said this once, maybe in an interview, but let’s go back to high school: when you show up wearing a graphic T-shirt, whether a specific skate brand, a specific band, or a specific sports team, that was the quickest way to identify yourself to like-minded individuals or any subset of a group or culture.

I’ll use skateboarding as an example. Some kids had Baker shirts that said one thing about who they were as a person: as skaters. You could immediately tell what kind of music they listened to if they had a Baker logo on their shirt because those were punk. We used the word hesh back in the day. Tight pants, all black, throwing themselves down big sets of stairs specifically. And then you had these kids wearing Shorty’s shirts, and maybe baggy pants with one of them rolled up. Listening to hip hop underground, they had Osiris on, which was a different kind of subset of skate culture.

In high school, when you’re around 14, you might not have a highly developed sense of style yet, but you could have the $15 to buy that one T-shirt with a logo that represents what you believe in or are into or just the aesthetic you like. This mentality is how I see T-shirt graphics, their primary audience, and who wears them. As I’ve gotten older, my work with T-shirts has undergone many phases. For example, my work for Total Luxury Spa continued my earlier skate culture work but was seen through an adult lens.

The importance of the T-shirt for me now fluctuates, but I think I’m back to not wearing any graphics. Graphics come and go. From 22 to 28, I didn’t touch graphics at all. I didn’t wear T-shirts with graphics on them. When I hit 29 or 30, I got back into graphics, and that was also when Total Luxury Spa was happening. So yeah, I think we’re seeing that sort of slowly go away right now. Some brands are out there making cool graphics, but I think their energy and interest might be fading a bit, maybe due to oversaturation or a cultural shift.

Right now, I’m unsure about the importance of wearing something on a shirt; I’m in a different mental zone. I think I’ve done enough T-shirts for years and years. The stuff I’ve made that never got released is also crazy. I’ve developed complete collections for brands and people no one will ever see. I think I’m good on T-shirts for a while. However, the importance remains, and T-shirts will always make a comeback because, for me, they were the first introduction to self-identity.

I can answer that question in one sentence.

It’s just 10,000 hours. That phrase gets thrown around a lot. Are you familiar with that term?

You have to put in the work; it’s time. You have to serve it, and there’s a reason for that specific amount of time and energy. I think you need to put in the effort. I’m not sure at what point in that process you hit that personal goal you’re aiming for, where you have the epiphany, and everything starts to click.

But I know that most people start their journey by trying to replicate something, which is normal. If you see someone directly copying something of mine, you’ll never see me publicly call them out unless it is a politician or someone I disagree with. I’ve never felt the need to protect my IP too strictly because I believe that people are just learning. I understand that part of their learning process involves replicating something. Even Kanye has said he used to try to replicate Dr. Dre’s songs, making the Explosive drums perfect, like, he found it, he figured it out.

You start with technicality, tools, and materials. You figure out how to use those tools and get good with your hands. Often, people find in this journey that when they use the tool to replicate something and can’t get it right, it’s because there’s that moment of ‘damn, I don’t know how he did this.’ When you’re trying to get something just right, such as trying to replicate the drums to get that snare perfect, but you don’t know how, after trying every plugin, you realize, I don’t know how he did it, and then you start exploring outside of those initial boundaries.

You’re like, “Let me step away and look at other instruments or try other techniques. Or maybe I can do it by hand and then record it.” You find yourself entering a different mode of discovery, not just trying to replicate what someone did but becoming more obsessed with figuring out why it wasn’t as easy as you thought. Once you’re in that zone, you can move into a different headspace, learning about what makes someone’s practice unique and why.

A good example is J Dilla’s drums. Some people can’t figure out why his signature sound is so unique. They might think, “This is just another low-fi hip-hop beat to chill and study; I don’t get it.” But I’m like, no, that’s the blueprint. It’s about the quantization, his deliberate lack of it, and the unique swing. Questlove explains in an RBMA panel that it sounds like a drunk kid on the drum set; it’s just not right, not perfect. And it’s this imperfection, more than the polish, that catches people’s attention.

This mark is exactly what I’m talking about: the signal, the static. It’s not a clear transmission. You might call it imperfection, but it’s just not quite right, a little off. And this is where the learning starts. That moment, you realize you can’t replicate what this person did on a one-to-one basis, and you begin to see it’s something special. You’re learning about what it takes and what it means to create something unique and special. That’s the pivotal moment where inspiration shifts, not just because you like how something looks or sounds but because you’re fascinated by how it was made.

Firstly, the work I’ve been sharing involving AI is from about two years ago. I’m very restrained in how I use AI and how I share it and apply it. And I guess I’m also restrained about how it’s presented and received. When it first came out, everyone was using Mid Journey, Stable Diffusion, or DALL E, and we saw a massive wave of images. This moment of whoa, everyone’s creating these insane images, you know, what’s going on? How is this made? I think there’s a lot of fear among creative individuals that this technology will, in many ways, replace the human touch or even erase job positions. But maybe it’s just threatening to their skill set because it’s trained on the skill sets of thousands of artists.

My core comparison or analogy is that a synthesizer was introduced into music at some point. And I’m pretty sure every guitarist, every drum player, every keyboardist (especially keyboardist) was probably like, “What the fuck is this? This new tool is insane. The synthesizer is threatening. It is not a real instrument. It is a computerized sound.” You don’t even need to learn how to play to do this. What’s this going to do to music? The fear people have is entirely valid.

There’s a turning point, though, where we’re in that gap where we’ve been introduced to this tool. We’re using this tool to replicate the work of existing things. This tool has way more potential to become a unique, specific thing that is being used to create work we’ve never seen before.

I want to discuss the introduction of Techno, for instance. Techno differs from the type of music a live guitarist, a keyboardist, and a drummer would ever create. Acid, specifically, is a genre of electronic music whose entire crux is the 303, which is the classic Roland instrument.

What I’m getting at is that they become instruments. It’s just another instrument. The introduction of the first synthesizer was probably scary to people. If you watched old library videos of people introducing synthesizers and theremins, everyone thought, “This is going to take away from us. We’re the musicians.” We’re in that gray area where we haven’t yet seen the new genre emerge.

Because everyone’s replicating the human with human-made work, we’ll eventually get to the point where the computer does the work. And maybe we’ve kind of dabbled in that, or maybe that made its presence known with NFTs. In my opinion, that wasn’t the point of the work with AI. I think that was just one of the first use cases. NFTs are so quantitative. You can spit out 1000 images and sell 1000 NFTs.

We haven’t found the invention of Techno yet. And I think what I’m doing with the work is also very much not a new genre of computer-created work. It’s work that has the same static and noise as handmade work, as my previous work. There is a difference between people using AI to make work for the first time and people who’ve been making work for 20 years, like myself, who are using AI as another instrument. We understand it’s an instrument, not the end-all-be-all. This is just my synthesizer. My synthesizer makes a specific sound. If I want that sound on this track, I bring it into the room. It’s just another instrument.

The best AI work I’ve seen comes from those already proficient with various tools. Every shocking and amazing piece I’ve seen created with AI has been by someone already an artist, image-maker, or designer with a solid skill set or a strong point of view. It seems they’ve discovered how to leverage this tool effectively. At the end of the day, it’s the vision.

Again, I waited two years to see these images. I spent six months straight doing work nonstop. And I’m not just telling the machine to give me something. You sort of train it. You feed it iterations of its work; you feed it references. You can also take certain aspects you like, cut around them, paste something different in the middle, send it back, and I’ll have it trained based on this. So, for example, if I notice something unique, like a weird lightning effect in the sky, it’s about identifying the patterns that the AI handles well or poorly. I believe there’s a kind of dark art to this that people who don’t use it don’t understand.

You have every right to question whether AI will take your job. However, the future of design with AI will depend on how good you are at using the instrument. It’s not just about the instrument but how good you are as an artist—the same as with a musician.

I might not know how to play the drums, but I can use a 909 or an 808 drum machine. However, that doesn’t make me a skilled drummer. People will realize and think, “That’s unimpressive because it’s just a preset being used.” Becoming a professional musician involves manipulating those presets and creating a sound from the machine that’s uniquely yours, something no one else has achieved before. That’s when you truly excel. Back to Acid House, it’s like, fuck, you’ve discovered something with the machine that no one has done before. You created a genre. Thinking in this way will allow a new genre to emerge and will no longer indicate a desire to replicate human play instruments.

(laughs) 10,000 hours.

Don’t stop. And about the 10,000-hour thing, I want to explore it more because it feels facetious to tell people, “Just keep going.” But it’s the truth.

If you think about any goal someone’s set, like maybe a weight goal, or you’re saying, “I wanna hit the gym, I’ve got a fitness goal,” or perhaps it’s a savings goal, an academic goal, the thing is, I believe the answer is just to keep going. You reach this point where you’ve been through it all. You’ve faced every little thing that could come up. What do you do when Photoshop crashes? Or what happens when it’s time to go to print? Oh, and then there’s the moment you discover DPI. Eventually, you will encounter enough scenarios.

That’s how evolution works, right? The thing about infinity is that it means everything, everywhere, exists all at once. There’s a universe where this interview didn’t even happen. There’s a version where I never touched a skateboard, and there’s one where you didn’t go to the college you’re at. All these possibilities exist somewhere. The idea of infinity is a scary thing for people. But the one thing I love about it is that, inevitably, every scenario has happened or is happening, right? So, because we’re stuck in this mortal realm of time, it’s not all happening at once for us. It unfolds linearly, consecutively.

That’s why you have to stick with it. In some other universes, I’ve already put in the 10,000 hours. But in this one, I haven’t. So, in a linear way, I have to work towards that.

Persistence is the goal. Looking forward is the only thing we can do. Drill Sergeants gave me this advice when I was in boot camp. We had to run on the beach in Camp Pendleton for more miles than I had ever run. And they just said, don’t look at the ground, look at the horizon. You know, every step along the way, you’re just staring at the ground, or you’re staring at things near you, or you’re staring at the house 100 ft away, or a boat 300 ft away. They said no. Look at the horizon, at the mountains over there. And when I did that, I locked in. I didn’t even realize how far I ran at all. It was a goal that I was never going to reach. It’s the horizon. You can’t reach a horizon. At a certain point, the horizon is a theory. That was amazing because it made me understand not to pay attention to all the noise around you. It’s just about cutting out the noise.