A practical and historical study of forgery and convincing imitation, in paint, prose, currency and code, asking what a fake teaches about the real thing it copies.
What you will do
Every week you make something convincing, in one of four materials — paint, prose, currency or code — and then find out exactly where it fails to convince: the studio is built around that failure, not around the making. You'll age a surface by hand and learn what a lab test would still catch, copy a signature and watch its stroke rhythm give it away, and by the final project write a full provenance file plausible enough to survive questioning at a crit. You walk out with three finished pieces — a convincing copy, a written case against a sample you didn't make, and an object with a history built to match it — and a genuinely useful reflex: checking what a claim of authenticity is actually resting on.
Who it is for
An elective for anyone who's sat through one semester of thinking critically about a discipline and wants to turn that scepticism into a hands-on craft. No prior studio, art-history or forensic background is assumed — the materials are taught from scratch, on the bench, in week 1. What the course does assume is patience for a slow craft skill and an honest appetite for being told, in public, exactly where your fake didn't hold up.