Tehching Hsieh’s yearlong isolation was an experiment in emptying out time

Evidence

In a 2012 interview, Hsieh says that he is not an endurance artist, yet he also says that the most important word to him is “will.” This makes sense if we accept that Cage Piece is less a feat of endurance than an experiment. In the interview, Hsieh, who was preoccupied with time and survival, described the process by which people fill up their time in an attempt to fill their lives with meaning. He was earnestly interested in the opposite: What would happen if he emptied everything out? His search for this answer occasioned the experiment’s many harsh “controls”—for it to work, it needed to be pure. “I brought my isolation to the public while still preserving the quality of it,” he said. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 273

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames Hsieh’s Cage Piece as intentional subtraction/emptying of meaning-filling, which is Odell’s template for refusal-as-experiment.
• SEED: An essay contrasting two models of idle time: filling it with meaning vs. emptying it out — Hsieh’s ‘controls’ as a way to make subtraction legible.