In Moscow stands the Shabolovka Radio Tower. Designed by Vladimir Shukhov during the Russian Civil War and completed in 1922, it is emblematic of a proletarianinspired avant-garde, not only in its design (reminiscent of the famous constructivist tower designed by Vladimir Tatlin in 1920), but also in its purpose: to affect the masses by transmitting radio waves across the new Soviet state. The tower still stands, rusting and decrepit – an obsolete yet strikingly beautiful emblem of modernism that perseveres despite the ever-encroaching city.

Radio towers, many of which are still etched on our landscapes, were icons of modernity and technological progress in the early twentieth century, enabling a wide(r)-scale transmission of information and culture. As a broadcast medium, radio was a ‘vital source of entertainment and information implicated in complex networks of transmission, reception and feedback’, notes Ian Whittington in his book on the BBC during the Second World War. Radio also provided a ready means for propaganda and misinformation to enter the home. Melissa Dinsman observes that radio was, and remains, a ‘medium historically connected to both the transmission of language and the military’, reminding us that modern mass media and communication technologies (including telephony, television and, more recently, the internet and social media) can be diverting and emancipatory as well as potentially destructive and repressive.

Transmission is a tremendously generative keyword for both modernity and modernism, and it has special purchase in theatre and dance. Technologically enabled transmission of information, ideas and culture is not unique to modernity, of course, but new forms of media, such as radio, meant that transmission could happen more quickly and at greater scale; such transmission could also be more egalitarian in terms of access. Modernity supercharged a human universal – the conveyance of information from person to person, place to place, and generation to generation. This is fundamental to culture, which, as George Steiner notes, depends on ‘the transmission of meaning across time’ as well as ‘the transfer of meaning in space’. In modernity new technologies and infrastructures, including those pertaining to transportation (trains, cars, aeroplanes), altered spatio-temporal experience and led to increased and enhanced opportunities for informational and cultural exchange.