your golf course made my GPU

every once in a while you're probably convinced of paradise 10,
UV Print on Silicon Wafer, 30 x 30 cm, Frame: 45 x 45 x 6 cm (2025)
your golf course made my GPU, 1 and 3 Channel Videos, 10’40 (2025)



when you have mixed feelings about your phone 20
UV Print on Silicon Wafer, 30 x 30 cm, Frame: 45 x 45 x 6 cm (2025)




Installation






when you have mixed feelings about your phone 10,
UV Print on Silicon Wafer, 30 x 30 cm, Frame: 45 x 45 x 6 cm (2025)



Detail





your golf course made my GPU, Video, 10’40 (2025)






sometimes you drown, but you're not sure if it's pleasure or guilt 10 and 11
UV Print on Silicon Wafer, 20 x 20 cm each, Frame: 29 x 29 x 6 cm each (2025)


when you have mixed feelings about your phone 10+12
UV Print on Silicon Wafer, 30 x 30 cm, Frame: 45 x 45 x 6 cm (each) (2025)








your golf course made my GPU, Video, 10’40 (2025)




when you have mixed feelings about your phone 21
UV Print on Silicon Wafer, 30 x 30 cm, Frame: 45 x 45 x 6 cm (2025)


Detail


Detail






Detail
when you have mixed feelings about your phone 20
UV Print on Silicon Wafer, 30 x 30 cm, Frame: 45 x 45 x 6 cm (2025)







your golf course made my GPU, 3 Channel Video, 10’40 (2025)




Installation

your golf course made my GPU, 3 Channel Video, 10’40 (2025)






every once in a while you're probably convinced of paradise 20,
UV Print on Silicon Wafer, 30 x 30 cm, Frame: 45 x 45 x 6 cm (2025)


Detail







when you have mixed feelings about your phone 12
UV Print on Silicon Wafer, 30 x 30 cm, Frame: 45 x 45 x 6 cm (2025)


Detail










Digital life is mineral. In your golf course made my GPU, Sam Ghantous explores the invention of time, earth, and technology made from the second most abundant of earthly elements: silica, or sand. In its various forms and products, sand has been the substrate onto which fantasies of progress are repeatedly projected, from the desert as a frontier to be settled, to the glass that ushered in a “transparent” modernity. 

The eponymous video traces three planetary trajectories. One is the rare, pure silica used both for microchips in our devices and for sand traps at the world’s most exclusive golf courses. Another follows China’s largest sand dredger, said to “edit the map” as it terraforms islands from scratch like a video game. Lastly, quartz crystals are introduced into atomic clocks, which discipline a shared subscription to time through networking. In seeking the new, this mineral, ground down over millions of years, is made to eat its own tail faster than it can be swallowed. 

A curved horizon of screens display the video in which layers of found footage from industrial commercials, leisure developments, hobbyist cultures, and the 1964 Japanese thriller Woman in the Dunes, are each brushed away like pixelated sediment. Singing sand dunes, an acoustic phenomenon of deserts, haunt the soundscape beneath a relentless pulse.

A series of UV prints on silicon wafers invoke the Tondo, the round Renaissance painting traditionally used for devotional scenes. Angels and nymphs in these reappropriations of Botticelli become anticipatory spectators, while their devotional subjects are substituted with  globalizing agents, from quarry stockpiles to artificial islands. These silicon wafers, discs containing microchips with billions of transistors etched at the nanometer scale, will eventually become GPUs or memory chips. Framing the prints are sand dunes that have been sedimented by hand and reprinted in plastic; an invention of the landscape as a fiction that can always be remade. 

Computing, and the visions it purports to promise, can’t escape its material sources.

Photographs courtesy of YveYANG Gallery. 


EXHIBITIONS

“your golf course made my GPU” at YveYANG Gallery (2025). 




WORKS

your golf course made my GPU
Video (1 and 3 Channel edits) 
10'40
Edition of 4 + 1 AP
(2024/2025).

when you have mixed feelings about your phone 
UV Print on Silicon Wafer 
30 x 30 cm, Frame: 45 x 45 x 6 cm 
Series with 4 unique editions
(2025).

every once in a while you're probably convinced of paradise
UV Print on Silicon Wafer 
30 x 30 cm, Frame: 45 x 45 x 6 cm
Series with 2 unique editions 
(2025).

sometimes you drown, but you're not sure if it's pleasure or guilt 
UV Print on Silicon Wafer 
20 x 20 cm, Frame: 29 x 29 x 6 cm each 
Series with 2 unique editions
(2023/2025).

   VISIT

“Sam Ghantous Finds Silicon Valley in a Sand Trap” by Jamin Warren in Killscreen Magazine


“Exhibition Review—Sam Ghantous: "your golf course made my GPU" at YveYang, New York City”by Yihsuan Chiu in Whitehot Magazine.

An Artist’s High-Tech Works Have Been Held Up in Customs. Are Tariffs to Blame?by Brian Boucher in Artnet.



PRESS RELEASE

https://www.yveyang.com/exhibitions/your-golf-course-made-my-gpu



INSTALLATION DRAWING




SAM GHANTOUS

sam at samtous.wtf

Updated May 2026