Fastidious Inquiry, Weird Compliance is a corona of sonnets, written by Anonymous. These sonnets express a fictional subject’s experience of, and involvement with, state powers of online surveillance during the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic in 2020.

Created over the course of two Engineering Fictions writing workshops, these sonnets were written by stakeholders from policing, government, health, academia and civil liberties groups in the U.K. Through these workshops, a meeting-place was formed where participants could enjoy a certain quality of anonymity, under the cloak of poetic fiction.

This chapbook is the outcome of a mutual, non-hierarchical, thoughtful and creative conversation between stakeholders of online state surveillance and policing during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

This chapbook was produced as part of the SUII funded dissemination programme, ‘Embedding Ethics by Design in the Policing of Digital Futures in Scotland’, led by Amy Humphrey, Megan O’Neill, and Burkhard Schafer.

Download the Chapbook as a PDF from its University of Dundee site and from Humanities Commons.

Fastidious Inquiry, Weird Compliance: A Corona of Sonnets was edited and designed by Jessica Foley, curator and host of Engineering Fictions, in Dublin, during the 2020/21 coronavirus pandemic.

Engineering Fictions is a collaborative and improvisational writing workshop for transdisciplinary thought experiment and artistic inquiry, created and curated by Jessica Foley. Its bespoke design affords people a time and meeting-place to creatively explore and respond to ideas, questions and doubts relating in some way to technology and communication, through fiction and word play. Please visit www.engineeringfictions.org for more information.