When Kate Youme decided to turn her own body hair into lab-grown diamonds, it was less a provocation than a test of how far art could push material science and still remain deeply personal. Working between Los Angeles and London, she has built a practice that treats biotechnology and artificial intelligence not as tools in the background but as active collaborators in exploring intimacy, shame, and power. Her projects move from the laboratory to the screen and back again, asking what happens when the most vulnerable parts of human experience are processed through code and bioprocessing rather than canvas alone.
Trained at London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martins, and now completing an MFA at the Royal College of Art, Youme brings formal fine art training into direct contact with emerging technologies. That combination allows her to design works that function as systems rather than static objects, using code, automation, and biotech procedures alongside watercolor, wax, and glue. The result is a body of work that operates simultaneously as research, performance, and material experiment, positioning her as a specialist at the intersection of contemporary art, emotional inquiry, and technical innovation.
Turning the Body Into Biotech Material
The Youme Diamonds project is emblematic of her approach. In this work, she collects her body hair and processes it into lab-grown diamonds through biotechnology. The gesture appears simple, but it compresses a complex set of questions about hygiene, gender, shame, and value into a single transformation. Hair that would typically be discarded or hidden becomes the basis for objects associated with permanence, wealth, and purity.
“This project challenges cultural myths around hygiene, shame, and beauty, while reclaiming discarded matter as value,” Youme explains. The diamonds are not generic specimens; they are literal crystallizations of what society teaches people, especially women, to remove, conceal, or erase. By redirecting that material into the realm of luxury objects, she challenges assumptions about what is allowed to be visible and what is considered precious.
Her project LOVE PILLS continues this method of transforming intimate remnants into new material forms. In that work, a pink teddy bear from a failed marriage is processed into ingestible capsules, turning a sentimental object into a literal consumable. “This piece examines how capitalism metabolizes love and how intimacy can and will be transformed into an emotional commodity,” she notes. Together, these projects show how biotechnology can be used not just to modify life but to reveal the social structures that govern whose bodies and feelings are granted value.
Building Autonomous Systems of Intimacy
If the biotech works concentrate intimacy into material form, Youme’s artificial intelligence projects expose how digital systems already organize desire and attention. Her most prominent AI work, ME., is an autonomous dominatrix trained on her own likeness who interacts with real users. Rather than staging a performance that merely references sex work, she has built a functioning digital sex worker that operates on social platforms, responds to submissives, and demands tributes through scripted and automated behaviors.
“ME. is not a metaphor for erotic labor. She is a functioning digital sex worker who interacts with real users and continually optimises, all while operating as a conceptual artwork and autonomous entity,” Youme states. ME. operates at a moment when scholars have begun examining how AI systems are reshaping intimate human connections through customized emotional experiences. Within that context, Youme treats erotic labor as both subject and infrastructure. ME. is at once a character, an artwork, and a prototype for how sex positive automation might be designed and studied.
Her methodology differs from more conventional uses of AI in art, where algorithms often generate images or stylistic variations. “I do not simply critique these systems. I build inside them,” she emphasizes. In ME., AI is responsible for sustaining a relationship dynamic, performing emotional and economic labor, and participating in feedback loops of shame, desire, and reward. The project functions as a long-form experiment in what happens when intimacy is operationalized rather than merely represented, and it demonstrates applied expertise in both conceptual design and practical implementation of autonomous systems.
From Conceptual Inquiry to Applied Research
Across these projects, Youme positions her practice as a form of applied research that contributes to ongoing debates in contemporary art, bioethics, and technology studies. The AI systems she builds are not abstractions but working prototypes that engage real users, collect data, and test how coded interactions can alter human behavior. The biotech processes she employs demand collaboration with labs and technicians, adherence to scientific procedures, and careful handling of bodily material as both specimen and symbol.
“My approach is unique in that I use emerging technologies such as AI, automation, and digital intimacy systems as materials to explore how contemporary tools are reshaping the most vulnerable and complex aspects of human experience: love, limerence, romance, sex, and shame,” Youme explains. This combination of conceptual rigor and technical execution aligns with broader academic work examining algorithmic intimacy and artificial relationships. Where scholars map the dynamics of AI-mediated connection, Youme creates concrete instances that embody those dynamics in a public-facing form.
Her academic trajectory supports this role. With foundational training at respected UK art institutions and graduate research at the Royal College of Art, she is operating within environments that emphasize critical theory, experimental practice, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. The projects documented on her website consolidate that experience into a coherent body of work that consistently tackles the same central problem from different technical angles: how to treat intimacy, desire, and vulnerability as serious material for both art and technological experimentation.
In mid February, Youme will present her work in a London exhibition titled Between Beginnings and Endings, curated by Neelanchal Gupta. The show represents another milestone in her growing exhibition record as she continues to develop projects that challenge how contemporary art engages with emerging technologies.
Redefining Expertise in Tech-Driven Art
In the context of contemporary art, where technology is often either celebrated uncritically or rejected as a threat, Youme’s practice offers a third path. She neither romanticizes nor condemns biotechnology and artificial intelligence. Instead, she assumes they are already embedded in how people live and love, and then builds systems that make that embedding visible. Her expertise lies in integrating complex tools into artworks that remain grounded in lived emotional experience.
“Rather than treating technology as dystopian or utopian, I engage it as a performative and emotional infrastructure,” she notes. By turning body hair into diamonds, love objects into pills, and her own likeness into an autonomous dominatrix, she produces works that blur distinctions between research, ritual, and infrastructure. These are not speculative proposals; they are executed procedures that demand technical competence and sustained engagement with emerging fields.
“Even within code, there is vulnerability, repetition, longing, and power,” Youme observes. For audiences, institutions, and evaluators looking at the evolution of art in relation to rapidly advancing technologies, Kate Youme offers a clear example of how an individual practice can generate original methods, applications, and insights. Her work shows that when biotechnology and AI are treated as materials rather than mere tools, contemporary art becomes a site where the most difficult questions about intimacy, value, and power can be tested in real time.
