Paul Virilio is one of the leading critics of art and technology working today. He has an exceptional scope of investigation, which includes everything from the city to military architecture, from technology to geopolitics, from speed to ecology, aesthetics, cinema and war. This scope, aligned with a potent and piercing critical intellect, comprises the most exciting thing about studying Virilio.

The Virilio Dictionary aspires to off er a compressed yet understandable introduction to Virilio's key concepts and clarify why his ideas are vital to our critical comprehension of contemporary art and technocultural studies. If we want an awareness of why Virilio's notions are signifi cant, and of the eff ect they are having on critical theory, art and technocultural studies, we must hang onto two important concepts simultaneously: phenomenology and hypermodernism. For many of his fellow critical theorists, Virilio is one of the world's most important interpreters of phenomenological ideas working in the present period; and his writings on hypermodernism are some of the most powerful examinations of that cultural phenomenon (Armitage 2000; James 2007). Anybody writing on these two subjects will most likely fi nd themselves wrestling with ‘Virilian’ notions.

Phenomenology is a movement rooted in the work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) concerned with philosophically examining and methodically enquiring into the argument that reality comprises of objects and events as they are perceived or appreciated in human consciousness and not of anything apart from human consciousness. It has been very prominent in numerous fi elds of critical, aesthetic and technocultural thought, and has had a specifi c infl uence on aesthetic criticism and technocultural studies: a detailed explanation and refl ection on phenomenology can be found in the entry on ‘Phenomenology’.