Cubo-Futurism (also called Russian Futurism or Kubo-Futurizm) was an art movement that arose in early 20th century Russian Empire, defined by its amalgamation of the artistic elements found in Italian Futurism and French Analytical Cubism. Cubo-Futurism was the main school of painting and sculpture practiced by the Russian Futurists. In 1913, the term ‘Cubo-Futurism’ first came to describe works from members of the poetry group ‘Hylaeans’, as they moved away from poetic Symbolism towards Futurism and zaum, the experimental “visual and sound poetry of Kruchenykh and Khlebninkov”. Later in the same year the concept and style of ‘Cubo-Futurism’ became synonymous with the works of artists within Ukrainian and Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde circles as they interrogated non-representational art through the fragmentation and displacement of traditional forms, lines, viewpoints, colours, and textures within their pieces. The impact of Cubo-Futurism was then felt within performance art societies, with Cubo-Futurist painters and poets collaborating on theatre, cinema, and ballet pieces that aimed to break theatre conventions through the use of nonsensical zaum poetry, emphasis on improvisation, and the encouragement of audience participation (an example being the 1913 Futurist satirical tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky). The coexistence of these differing strands of artistic practice within Cubo-Futurism reflects an ideological preoccupation with collective renewal and deconstruction (a notion born of their post-revolutionary context) with each poet or painter free to create their own aesthetic consciousness based on the concept of revolution and collective action through reinterpretation of artistic and social traditions. Background Importance of Post-Revolutionary context In the context of late tsarist Russia, society was deeply divided by social class. Russian industrialisation, development, economic growth, and urbanisation fell far behind other Western nations, with the country experiencing high levels of illiteracy, poor health care, and struggling with the limitations of little mass communication outside larger cities. Looking outward at the realities of those from neighbouring countries, artists who would later become members of the Cubo-Futurist movement noticed the impacts of the burgeoning Machine Age on everyday life, recognising the beauty, dynamism, and energy of the utilitarian machine aesthetic leading to a renewed interest in technological modernisation within art, poetry, and life. Ukrainian modernist painter Aleksandr Shevchenko (1883–1948) echoed this sentiment when, in 1913, he stated, “the world has been transformed into a single, monstrous, fantastic, perpetually-moving machine, into a single huge non-animal automatic organism… [this] cannot help but be reflected in our thinking and in our spiritual life: