Final project — Provenance
Make a convincing object and a convincing history for it — the capstone that turns every earlier studio's craft into one complete case for a fake.
Due: 13 October 2027 · Weight: 40%
The brief#
Make an object, and make the paper trail that would convince a sceptical buyer it’s real.
Provenance is the semester’s argument, made in one piece of work: that an object’s claimed history can matter as much as the object itself, and that both halves are craft, and both are fakeable, and both get checked differently. Choose your subject as early as week 8 — the studios that week onward are built around having something concrete to develop. The material can be anything the semester has touched: a painting with an invented exhibition history, a manuscript with a forged correspondence trail, a currency design with a fabricated minting record, a codebase with a rewritten commit history and a laundered licence.
What you submit#
The object itself, in whatever form suits the material, and a provenance file: the documents, records or history that would make a sceptical buyer or reviewer believe it’s genuine. Both halves are presented and defended in person at the week 12 final crit, where the room questions the provenance file the way real due diligence would.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- submitted by the deadline, as an object (or text, currency design or code artefact) plus a complete provenance file
- the provenance file cites specific, real kinds of documentation (sale records, exhibition history, correspondence, commit history — matched to the chosen material) rather than only asserting the object is genuine
- presented and defended under questioning at the final crit
How it is marked
Provenance is judged as one complete case, not as an object plus a separate document. A strong submission makes a specific, ambitious choice of subject in week 8 and develops both halves in proportion to each other — an exceptional object with a thin history, or a watertight history for an unconvincing object, both fall short of what the brief actually asks for. Particular attention goes to whether the provenance file would survive the kind of questioning the final crit puts it through, and whether the whole submission stands on its own without you there to explain it.