Elizabeth Demaray is a professor at the Department of Visual, Media and Performing Arts at Rutgers University and a sculptor whose practice intersects eco-art, art and technology, art/science collaboration, and biodesign. Their work explores the boundaries between the natural and the engineered, often manifesting as poetic, functional systems that bring speculative futures into the present.

They have built listening stations for birds that play human music, cultivated lichen on the sides of skyscrapers in New York City, and developed floraborgs—AI-assisted robotic supports that allow potted plants to move autonomously within domestic spaces.

In 2019, with support from the John Dighton Lab at Rutgers University, they began work on Home Is Where the Plastic Eating Stomach Is—a living sculpture that consumes plastic through the metabolic activity of fungi. This piece became the foundation for a larger body of work that evolved into Cookbook for When the Sun Goes Out, an exhibition of speculative artworks first presented in 2023.

The exhibition envisions a climate-warming scenario in which rainforests dry up and burn, darkening the sky and potentially triggering a new ice age. In response to this imagined future, the works in Cookbook explore non-heliocentric energy sources and propose alternative strategies for human survival, including what we might eat, when the sun is no longer our guide.