Free digital art installation by Sam Ghantous that uses sand to explore the link between earth and technology, part of the V&A x London Design Festival 2026.
Sam Ghantous is showing your golf course made my gpu at the V&A South Kensington this weekend, in Architecture, Room 127. It's a digital art installation that takes silica — or sand, the second most abundant element on earth — and follows it from the ground into the hardware we use every day.
Ghantous treats sand as a substrate onto which we project our desires and aspirations for progress. The work brings together imagery and material products that trace its travel and its state changes: the microchip industry, artificial islands, and quartz crystals. By reconnecting digital technologies to their geological origins, the installation asks how visions of progress become embedded in matter, and how the futures we imagine remain inseparable from the earth that makes them possible. It's a way of seeing the physical cost and the physical source of the digital world we usually take for granted.
It's part of the V&A x LDF 2026 (#LDF26) programme, within the Digital Art Season: On Agency, curated by Kristian Volsing and produced by Katya Spiers. The title itself points to the connection — the sand that makes up a golf course is the same silica that goes into the GPU powering a computer.
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It's on show until Sunday 18 October, with the gallery open from 10:00 to 17:30 on both Saturday and Sunday. Entry is free.
Date
17 October – 18 October
10:00
Location
V&A South Kensington, Room 127Price
Free
Recommended Age
+14 years
