Fastidious Inquiry, Weird Compliance: A Corona of Sonnets by Anonymous

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. These sonnets were written over the course of two Engineering Fictions writing workshops, 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. 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. 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. Please visit https://www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/Programmes/OpenCall201920/DigitalPolicing.aspx for more about this project. 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