The Interior Performance Art

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Participants in “The Quiet Volume,” a stealth performance piece at New York University’s Bobst Library.

What is the sound of two heads reading?

On Tuesday, in a hushed sixth-floor reading room in New York University’s Bobst Library packed with students cramming for final exams, the answer might have seemed to be: nothing much.

But for three pairs of readers scattered among the laptop-laden tables, wearing special headphones hooked up to iPod Nanos and shuffling through a pile of suspiciously literary books, the act of reading was transformed into a strange â€" and sometimes very loud â€" drama of turning pages, pointing fingers and eerily drifting thoughts.

“The first thing you notice is that for a place dedicated to silence, there’s not really that much silence at all,” a British-accented voice whispered into the readers’ ears. “After a while you start to think that it might be better considered as a place dedicated to the collection of sounds.”

The readers, who had signed up in advance, were both the audience and the stars of “The Quiet Volume,” a 55-minute stealth performance piece by the British artists Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells being staged through Sunday by Performance Space 122 as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. (The piece, which also comes in a Spanish-language version, is also running at the Schomburg Center in Harlem.)

Regular patrons hardly seemed to notice when the readers turned their books upside down, or ran their fingers in unison under passages in the identical piles of novels in front of them (by José Saramago, Kazuo Ishiguro and Agota Kristof), or flipped through a book of depopulated cityscapes by the photographer Gabriele Basilico, or just stared at a blank page in a spiral-bound notebook.

The mental action, however, was far more disorienting and sometimes edged toward violence. Readers turned to passages containing words like “strangulation,” “saboteurs” and “death sentence,” which were subtly altered by a voice reading along, or overwhelmed by a tide of white noise. They were asked to imagine all the books in a huge library cut up into their individual words, then separated into huge drawers reading “knife,” “cloud” or “the.”

At one point, books slammed shut from an uncannily precise location a few feet to the listeners’ left â€" inside the headphones, or outside in the real-life library? â€" causing the listener to brace for a librarian’s angry “Shhhhh!”

The cumulative effect was to make you wonder what kind of frozen sea was really breaking inside the earbud-wearing guy at the next table, hunched over “Essentials of Importing and Exporting.”

“The whole thing made you think about the nature of your sensory experience while reading, the relationship between the voice in your head and the words on the page,” said Jessica Harris, a graduate student who had just finished performing the piece with a friend.

One goal of “autoteatro,” as Mr. Hampton, 37, calls the self-enacted theater pieces he began creating in 2007, is to blur the distinction between presence and absence, inside and outside, reality and imagination, art and the real world.

It’s a question that a second piece Mr. Hampton is staging during the festival, “Cue China (Elsewhere, Offshore),” pushes in a markedly political direction. In that piece, pairs of participants are ushered into a darkened room behind the library’s circulation desk, precisely measured, and then asked to sit perfectly still for 26 minutes facing each other while seated at a contraption made of mirrors and glass, their heads held in place by metal supports so their pupils line up precisely.

The setup feels like preparations for ominously quaint joint eye surgery. But what follows is an uncomfortable and strangely moving virtual conversation with a real-life Chinese worker, whose face is projected directly onto that of the person sitting across from you.

“Your participation is simply about your body being present,” Mr. Hampton explained. “You’re donating your body so someone who isn’t there can occupy the room.”

That someone is Jia Jingchuan, one of more than 130 of workers who sustained severe nervous system damage after the factory where they worked started using a known toxin to clean the iPhone screens they were manufacturing â€" a case that generated international news coverage.

That seemingly familiar story â€" unfolding on the unfamiliar screen of another human face â€" goes in unexpected directions, ending with a revelation that Mr. Hampton, who interviewed Mr. Jia via QQ, the Chinese equivalent of Skype, said took him completely by surprise.

But for participants, the most unexpected thing might be how much time Mr. Jia spends smiling and laughing.

That footage came mostly from the parts of the interview where Mr. Hampton was explaining how the art piece would work.

“In most news reports about people depicted as victims, there’s no space for their sense of humor or curiosity,” he said. “But they can also be very curious about us. That’s very important.”