Counterfeits, Forgeries, and Hoaxes

For a number of years now, I’ve been fascinated by the theory that we’ve never gone to the moon. I don’t really care if we have or not, I’m more interested in visual evidence and the compositional tactics of persuasive media.  Whether it’s fake hundred dollar bills, fake Vermeers, or fake trips to the moon, I would like to study that which is put forward as visible evidence for and against an object’s authenticity.  Let’s not be too quick to assume that it’s easy to copy an object. It’s easy to make a bad copy but difficult to make a good one. Further, it’s difficult to prove an object’s authenticity—some of the most convoluted techniques of scientific analysis are often found in problems of authentication. When it comes to counterfeits, forgeries, and

hoaxes, these criminals, hacks, and crackpots at times demonstrate an expertise and visual cunning that rival or exceed the best examples of what we in the architectural world would call “a rendering.”  So in this course, I would like for you to study with me techniques of faking the real. It is essentially a course

about renderings. Towards this, I want to posit that because we can recognize only those things that we have seen before, all techniques of faking the real is a copying problem—because it is essentially a problem of making something look like something we have seen before.  To make it more difficult, I would like to throw a philosophical monkey wrench into this simple goal of developing techniques of making renderings look more real. I have come to the opinion that it is impossible to copy.  Everything that we call a copy is simply another object that is as real as the original (in an absolute sense, the fake is a real fake). An object’s authenticity is then never absolute. It is instead a consequence of a conceptual apparatus that organized life depends on. It is ultimately a political problem—we have to agree amongst

ourselves that there is a way for something to be original and agree on how we authenticate something or someone. If you don’t see where I’m going with this, think about what happens when you go through airport security.  As you know, there is nothing worse than something or someone that is fake. We admire earnestness and originality. We love naturalness and uniqueness. It would be devastating to find out that the object or person we

love turned out to be a fake. As people that admire deep expertise, perhaps we should instead be impressed.