anthony.santella@gmail.com

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Anthony Santella was born in Manhattan in 1977. He grew up in Teaneck, NJ with his identical twin brother, drawing with crayons and sculpting with twigs, pine cones and dirt before moving on to oil paint, woodcarving and the IBM XT. His interest has always been shared between traditional and digital media. He earned a BA in Computer Science from New York University and a PhD from Rutgers University, where his thesis work employed eye tracking technology to guide detail allocation in stylized renderings derived from photos, emulating the purposeful abstraction of traditional representational art. His research on graphics, computer vision and computational aesthetics has been published in CHI, SIGGRAPH, NPAR and Nature Methods. Largely self-taught as a sculptor, Anthony’s current studio work focuses on carvings in reclaimed wood from storm-downed trees. His carefully wrought sculptures draw on the forms of traditional European, African and Native American ritual woodcarving to explore modern dreams and nightmares. Anthony’s computational and sculptural work is unified by an interest in how the formal characteristics of an object carry and complicate informational content whether technical or metaphysical.