Seah is the artist name for Chelsea Heikes, an artist and writer whose work focuses on Critical Feminist Posthumanism, the body, and reimagining relational ecologies. Having trained in somatic movement practices such as Butoh, Body Weather Laboratory, and Noguchi Taiso, seah uses the cultivated awareness of sensation to explore the posthuman body as a conduit within the myriad of ecologies on this planet.

These movement practices embody Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology, the shifting terrain of the psyche – a beingness that is fluid, always in transition, “becoming”. As opposed to the static subject of Humanism. This nomadic subjectivity is necessary for becoming-imperceptible, a state which seah describes as a de-centering of recognizable “humanness” that allows for somatic, phenomenological experiences of what it means to be posthuman.

The work evolves at the intersection of the human body, environmental bodies, and technology. Deeply invested in examining intra-actions amongst these three entities in the scope of Critical Feminist Posthumanism and New Materialisms, the art as research practice begins at the human body, through somatic movement practices and spirals out from there. These practices open the practitioner to experiencing their human body as “other-than-human”. It is through these movement practices that terrain is a space for investigation, using field recording technologies that are brought into the studio. Less interested in “pure” field recordings, the final audio-visual compositions reach toward evoking the felt experience of place, porosity, and being an ecological body.

Artist talks, presentations, and performances, as well as lectures have been presented at conferences, festivals, etc. at universities, institutions, museums, and galleries. Most recently this has occurred at Harvard University’s Music Department and Rensselaer PolyTechnic Institute,