Cage Piece

 

Astronaut Bruce McCandless II became the first human being to do a spacewalk without a safety tether linked to a spacecraft. In 1984, he floated completely untethered in space with nothing but his Manned Maneuvering Unit keeping him alive.

Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing, writes about Diogene's and how much discipline and effort it takes to be a refuseniks... people who refuse the normal trappings of the current world.  (Earlier she writes about Bartleby).  She talks about performance artist Tehching Hsieh.

In 1978, he built a roughly nine-foot-square cage in his studio for Cage Piece, a performance in which he would remain inside the cage for exactly a year.  Every day, a friend would visit to bring food and remove waste.  Beyond that, Hsieh drew up some draconian terms for himself: He was not allowed to talk, read, or write (except for marking each day on the wall); no television or radio was allowed. In fact, the only other thing in the cell besides the bed and the sink was a clock. The performance was open to the public once or twice a month; otherwise, he was alone.  Asked later how he spent his time, Hsieh said that he had kept himself alive and thought about his art.

In a 2012 interview, "Hsieh, who was preoccupied with time and survival, described the process by which people fill up their time in an atempt to fill their lives with meaning.  He was earnestly interested in the opposite: What would happen if he emptied everything out."