Although occasionally understood as identical with Virilio's contemporary theoretical approach, which he often characterises as the ‘critique of the art of technology’ (e.g. Virilio and Armitage 2009: 103), this term designates principally his theoretical writings on the relationship between aesthetics and technology. Virilio's critique of the art of technology was instituted as the critique of military technology at the ‘Atlantic Wall’ – Adolf Hitler's Second World War defensive system against an expected Allied attack that extended from France to Scandinavia – in 1958, developed in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s and matured from the 1980s onwards. Its most important infl uences are Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and, more recently, Hans Jonas (1903–93). Virilio also contributes to numerous academic journals, periodicals and newspapers on problems relating to technology.

Virilio's interest in the association between aesthetics and technology is beholden throughout to his and Claude Parent's architectural theory (Virilio and Parent 1996 and 1997) but embraces a less ‘oblique’-based model in Virilio's writings on Bunker Archeology (1994a [1975]) and the contemporary impact of military technology on the organisation of space. This diff erentiated it from the geopolitical intonation of certain of Virilio's (1993) works, conceived in what some might think to be too close an empathy with the Marxist philosophy of Herbert Marcuse (1991 [1964]). Virilio's fi rst major work on the connection between aesthetics and technology is his Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (2006 [1977]), a critique of the military and political impact of the nineteenthand twentieth- century revolutions in transportation and transmission technologies, which are perceived by Virilio as complicit with ‘the time of the fi nite world […] coming to an end’ and the ‘beginnings of a paradoxical miniaturization of action, which others prefer to baptise automation (SP, 156).