Week 1: 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.
27 July 2027
A copy and a forgery are not the same object under two names — a copy declares itself, a forgery doesn’t, and the entire difference between them is a single piece of missing paper: the note. This week draws that line properly, across four materials the semester keeps returning to: paint, prose, currency and code. Every one of them has its own history of people faking it convincingly, and every one of those histories teaches something real about how the genuine article is actually made — a lesson forgers learn earlier than anyone, because failing to fake something is the fastest way to find out what you left out.
Outline#
- the note: what turns a copy into a forgery, and why the object itself can’t tell you
- four materials, one semester: paint, prose, currency, code
- how a studio grades a fake — the studio spec is the contract
- what “The Forger’s Craft” is not: not a course in getting away with it
Teaching team
- Dr Petra Voss — convenor