## Abstract

Sensing the City was a research project, an artwork, a catalyst for re-inventing Coventry. There was a desire to rethink the city, an attempt to gauge the future – its possibility – not on a logic of representation, but in affirming the silent potential that the body always shelters within itself. In Sensing the City, they dreamed – all of them – of a new ring-road, of a new precinct, of a different plaza, of an elemental urbanism, the free play of the senses, the city as an aesthetic paradigm. In the virological city of today, the ambivalence that Artaud saw in the plague makes a new appearance. In the virological cities of our COVID present, there has been constant recourse – a banal riposte – to the imagery of science fiction; as if, that is, the future finally met itself in images forged in the past.