What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team
reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a
real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they
feed.
What is a copy?
The opening lecture — why a course about fakes is a course about the real thing, and how the twelve weeks are built around one failure at a time.
Week 1 · 27 July 2027
The connoisseur's eye
How an expert actually spots a fake painting — not by magic instinct, but by a trained, describable set of things a forger has to get right at once.
Week 2 · 3 August 2027
Materials don't lie (usually)
The chemistry and physics that catch a forger long after the eye is fooled — pigment dates, paper stock, and the science of an anachronism.
Week 3 · 10 August 2027
Forging the hand — text, signatures and the tell in language
From the Hitler diaries to a forged signature on a cheque — what makes handwriting and prose fakeable, and what in them almost always gives it away.
Week 5 · 24 August 2027
Currency and the state's own arms race
Why banknotes look the way they do — a design history driven entirely by an ongoing contest with forgers, and what that contest teaches about design.
Week 6 · 31 August 2027
Provenance — the paper trail that makes an object real
Why an object's history of ownership is sometimes worth more to its authenticity than the object itself, and how that history gets faked too.
Week 7 · 7 September 2027
Code as forgery — plagiarism, licence-laundering, and a git history that lies
What forging a painting has in common with faking a commit history or laundering a licence, and where the analogy stops holding.
Week 8 · 14 September 2027
Synthetic media I — what a generative model actually learned to copy
A guest lecture on what an image or voice model is actually imitating when it generates something convincing, and why that's a different question to "is it real."
Week 9 · 21 September 2027
Synthetic media II — detection, and its own failure modes
The second guest lecture — how synthetic-media detection actually works today, and the honest limits of a field that is still losing some rounds.
Week 10 · 28 September 2027
The market for authenticity
Why fakes matter economically as well as aesthetically — insurance, provenance markets, and what the demand for authenticity actually prices.
Week 11 · 5 October 2027