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I decide to drop by Arseny Zhilyaev’s workshop at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow last November, only to find that instead of sitting quietly in the corner and listening to presentations, I am expected to assume the role of artist myself Along with my new-found colleagues, I am to make art as part of a role-playing game set in the Russian Cosmic Federation of the near future By this point in human history, all art is created by AI, but man’s input is still required to advance the performance of machines What we produce is to be evaluated by an assistant curator at Garage, and Zhilyaev himself, who will decide which of us is to represent the Russian Cosmic Federation at an Intergalactic Biennale   I am nervous before the game starts, and bubble with excitement as everyone around me transforms into inhabitants of a post-futurist art world But I get prematurely bored after the first two rounds of producing concepts as a member of the collective, Experimental Zombie Formalism Turns out the art world’s grip on creative freedom can feel suffocating, even in the future In response, my comrades and I go on strike, organize an alternative (and highly irreverent) annual biennale, and end up establishing a cult, of which I am the chief goddess Fictional CEO of a fictional cult, with a divine status acknowledged by a board of devoted disciples – not the worst outcome for a struggling artist in a precarious sci-fi future My brief period of art making, however, does not bring me intergalactic institutional recognition, nor does my work make it into planetary collections I shall perish, nameless and forgotten, as my body dissolves into the ether   Zhilyaev’s work – a mixture of installation, fiction, archival research, publishing, and most recently role-play games – combines Russian cosmist philosophy with a vision of a dystopian soon-to-come The philosophy of cosmism – a mind-boggling combination of science, technology, and spirituality – was originally dreamed up by the nineteenth-century Russian thinker Nikolai Fedorov Fedorov advocated for immortality, and the resurrection of all human beings, proposing that our ever-extending