Silicon Valley in a Sand Trap with Sam Ghantous
The same silica that powers your GPU fills the sand traps at Augusta National. Artist Sam Ghantous joins us to discuss "your golf course made my GPU," his three-channel video installation that traces the geological origins of our digital obsessions.
Ghantous admits he's afraid of hardware. Despite this—or because of it—he's spent the past year confronting the physical reality behind our screens. Using Unity and Unreal Engine not to make games but to interrogate them, he reveals how ultra-pure silica mined in North Carolina becomes both microchips and golf course sand. The work forces us to reckon with what he calls the "big sludge of media" that surrounds us—accessible on one hand, black-boxed on the other.
We discuss his childhood moving between Oman, the Middle East, and North America, and how this itinerant experience shaped his understanding of sand's perpetual movement. He describes printing UV images onto silicon wafers—the raw material of microchips—creating what he calls "portals" framed by rings of sand scanned in his studio. Behind the cleared dust, ethereal reimaginings of Botticelli paintings emerge.
The conversation toggles between pleasure and guilt, much like the two voices in his video work—a synthetic childlike inquisitor and the artist's own voice. We talk about Chinese sand dredgers "editing the map" at planetary scale, golfers trapped in bunkers, and future projects where "Hello World" might take millions of years to print in deep time computing.
"I'm not standing on some moral high ground," Ghantous tells us. "I'm struggling with the temptations, both for new things and for fascinating things, but also trying not to look at my phone more."
Currently teaching at ETH Zürich, Ghantous hints at future works: games affecting one another across distances, sculptures bringing earthliness and computation together, seeking new languages for the consequences of our actions on other parts of the planet.
This episode was hosted by Jamin Warren, founder of Killscreen. Music by Nick Sylvester.
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at info@killscreen.com.
