Deep Fried Virtues: Leisure in the Digital Age

In an era shaped by digital platforms, leisure has transformed from a space of reflection into one of curated performance and endless scrolling. What ancient thinkers like Aristotle saw as essential for contemplation and self-development is now fragmented by algorithmic design and reactive attention. This article therefore reflects on the writer’s fine arts research project which investigates how visual art, especially painting, can slow down this digital beat and reinterpret leisure as a purposeful, moral activity against the complex nature of social media platforms.

Grounded in autoethnography, digital anthropology, and material experimentation, it treats artistic practice as a method of inquiry into how platforms shape behaviour. Central to this is Shannon Vallor’s framework of techno-moral virtues, including empathy, self-control, and humility, offering ethical tools for navigating online life. The project thus positions visual art as a powerful strategy for media literacy, helping learners critically engage with the systems they use daily and fostering awareness, agency, and ethical reflection in an age of distraction.

The problem: Leisure, Then and Now

Even while Aristotle and other ancient philosophers viewed leisure as a time for reflection and virtue cultivation, modern digital platforms have fundamentally changed that idea. Skolê, a Greek concept, connected leisure to education and personal growth. However, this has been replaced by fragmented time, reactive attentiveness, and performative rest in the era of infinite scroll. As Shannon Vallor observes, “Leisure is one thing our age does not afford most modern technology consumers.” The challenge isn’t that we lack access to leisure, it’s that we struggle to choose where to invest our time meaningfully, especially in systems designed to keep us scrolling.

Platforms That Blur Boundaries

While social media sites like Instagram and TikTok offer entertainment, they also encourage self-performance, hyperconsumption, and distraction. With its roots in platform capitalism, they blur the lines between identity, labour, and leisure. Jean Baudrillard compared this dynamic to the “hypermarket” of existence, where even sleep is a commodity. These platforms promote time-deepening, or the stacking of several tasks into one instant, which substitutes compulsive multitasking for concentrated experience. Leisure has become ingrained in the logic of productivity, from browsing while eating to taking in content while driving or even driving.

This collapse of boundaries is what Baudrillard termed hyperreality, a condition where simulation overtakes the real and representations become more influential than what they once referred to. The hypermarket, in his view, was an early sign of this shift: a space where products, stripped of context or need, circulate as signs of identity and aspiration. Baudrillard described this process as unfolding in stages, from faithful representations to deliberate distortions, and eventually to pure simulation, where signs no longer refer to anything real at all. Today’s digital platforms have intensified this logic. Social media turns every post, image and interaction into a sign, curated not for expression but for recognition. Leisure, in this sense, is no longer experienced directly; it is staged, mediated and optimised for visibility. The result is a reality that feels vivid but is increasingly detached from lived experience.

Furthermore, this has given rise to what Alex Grech notes as ‘figurational order,’ where similar formats are used for activism, communication, and entertainment, flattening boundaries between purpose and pleasure further.

Context and a troubling shift

Citing Jo Tacchi, anthropologists Heather Horst and Daniel Miller contend that the consequences of digital technology are dependent upon the cultural and social circumstances in which it is used, rather than being intrinsically beneficial or harmful. This supports Vallor‘s claim that moral virtues need to be developed in order to make moral decisions. Furthermore, Baudrillard’s theory and digital anthropology both point to troubling shifts where leisure has become a space of simulation and faces amplified mediation. Platforms mediate not only communication but behaviour and visual culture. And while these systems feel intuitive, their logics are hidden. This is where media literacy becomes vital, as analysis, as well as action. And in this project, that action begins with art.

The Method: Art as an Inquiry

In addition to representing digital life, this project explores it through art. The practice of art turns into a kind of investigation, a method of studying patterns, structures, and behaviours that are frequently overlooked. In this instance, painting serves as a tool to slow down digital culture and consider the systems that control our attention, as Marshall McLuhan famously asserted that the medium changes our perception of the message. This technique, which is influenced by digital anthropology and autoethnography, uses visual habits and personal experience to transform ordinary leisure into a critical analytical space.

Screenshot Archiving: Capturing the Feed

The first step was methodical screenshot archiving from Instagram and TikTok accounts, including test profiles designed to simulate different levels of interaction. Even with minimal activity, content was algorithmically curated, reinforcing how platforms guide our experiences under the illusion of autonomy. Screenshots were grouped according to themes and Shannon Vallor’s techno-moral virtues to identify how these values are challenged or distorted by social media content. Moreover, this method aligned with Baudrillard’s first stage of reality, where signsare still perceived as direct reflections of ‘profound’ reality.

Digital Composition: Layering the System

Next, the screenshots were digitally layered into visual compositions. This was not just aesthetic, as it also allowed patterns to emerge, such as repetition, interface similarity, emotional triggers, and attention bait. These collages reflected what Baudrillard calls the “second stage” of simulation, when signs no longer reflect reality but distort it. The compositions abstracted the original context while retaining markers of the digital (likes, emojis, timestamps), visually representing how social media flattens diverse content into a single, endless feed.

Deep Frying: Exaggerating the Excess

Drawing back to Baudrillard’s third stage of reality, masking the absence of reality, this research adopted and adapted the process of deep frying digital images. Deep frying, is a process from meme culture, particularly Black Twitter, where images are repeatedly compressed, saturated, and distorted. Here, this digital manipulation was embraced as a critical aesthetic and became a visual metaphor as the more content circulates the more it degrades. Influenced further by Hans Blumenberg’s idea of the absolutism of reality, visual distortion became a way to navigate the overwhelming intensity of digital culture. Although it mimics the visual language and blur of constant exposure, it slows it down for reflection.

Deep fried collage, generated by the author

Painting: Reclaiming Time and Attention

Finally, the deep-fried compositions were translated into acrylic paintings, a medium that demands time, labour, and decision-making. Where the digital is frictionless and disposable, painting reintroduces physical presence and intentionality. Stylistic influences included Seurat’s structured pointillism, Van Gogh’s expressive gesture, Mavignier’s dot rhythms, and Chuck Close’s pixelated illusions. The process disrupted ephemerality by giving lasting form to digital fragments. In addition, colours were carefully restricted to primary tones and later intensified to artificial ones, for dialogue between natural pigments and screen-based hues. A direct connotation to Jonathan Crary’s suggestion that color is increasingly flattened by capitalists homogenisation. Therefore, with the notion that translation across medium inevitably alters its meaning, this reflected Baudrillard’s fourth stage of reality, where an image becomes a new reality.

The Framework: Media Literacy and the Viewer’s Role

Ultimately, a key finding of this project was how painting reintroduces presence and contemplation into content originally designed for distraction. By slowing down the speed and flattening of the digital feed, the work reframes ephemeral content as something tactile, intentional, and ambiguous. Layering, distortion, and fragmentation become visual metaphors to prompt new perspectives on familiar visuals. Shifting from passive consumption to a potential to pause, consider, and critically engage.

The Gaze as Agency

This shift culminated in the viewer’s role. Seven paintings, each 40 x 60 cm, were presented without wall texts, instead paired with Shannon Vallor’s techno-moral virtues as curatorial anchors. Their elongated proportions mimic the verticality of a phone screen, but the content refuses clarity. Up close, viewers are drawn into layered brushstrokes, while from a distance, shapes begin to cohere into something vaguely familiar. This play of proximity and perception aligns with Cal Newport’s idea of ‘digital decluttering,’ which consists of stepping back to evaluate the purpose of our digital habits.

Painted collage, #painting 7, produced by author

The Subversion of Spectatorship

In this project, the gaze becomes a compositional tool. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas, this project asks, who controls the image: the artist, the viewer, or the algorithm? By recontextualising private digital content into public physical space, the paintings resist the platform’s nature and invite ethical participation. They challenge the gaze as a passive act and return it as an active one, asking the viewer not just to look but to interpret.

Media Literacy as Ethical Awareness

Leisure is no longer neutral; it’s shaped by algorithms, attention markets, and platform capitalism. In this context, media literacy is a skill as well as an ethical practice, a way of seeing with awareness. While digital anthropology and media studies offer theoretical tools, art creates the space for contradiction, metaphor, and lived complexity. In a world where, as Vallor suggests, those with more self-discipline (or privilege) have greater agency over their digital choices, visual culture, and in turn, media literacy can help redistribute awareness. Not necessarily by offering definite answers, but by making the questions visible.

Conclusion: Slowness as Resistance

The aim of this project was to reclaim leisure by slowing down digital habits and reimagining them through artistic practice. Screenshots exposed passive repetition; digital collage introduced reflection; deep frying exaggerated overstimulation; and painting restored time, labour, and intentionality. Each stage represents both method and metaphor, resisting platform-driven speed and offering a contemplative alternative. While the process faced contradictions, it proved the value of art as inquiry and a vehicle to prompt critical engagement. As Arthur Brooks suggests, true leisure is work done without economic compulsion. This project embraces this understanding, along with the processes of slowness, distortion, and material presence, in order to reclaim leisure as its true potential.