Ann Hamilton at the Park Avenue Armory Philip Greenberg for The New York Times The event of a thread Ann Hamilton's installation at the Park Avenue Armory features 42 swings, whose use by visitors agitates an immense curtain. Anyone who liked swings as a child - and that should include quite a few of us - will probably feel a surprisingly visceral attraction to Ann Hamilton's installation "the event of a thread" at the Park Avenue Armory. The work is the latest from one of the more self-effacing orchestrators of installation-performance art, and her first new piece in New York in more than a decade. It centers on an immense, diaphanous white curtain strung across the center of the armory's 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Dispersed on either side are 42 large wood-plank swings, suspended from the hall's elaborately trussed ceiling beams by heavy chains that are also tied to the rope-and-pulley system that holds up the curtain. The swings are there for us, to swing on. "The people formerly known as the audience," in the memorable words of the media critic Jay Rosen, form a crucial ingredient of the work as never before in Ms. Hamilton's art. The piece has other components, about which more in a minute, but if people are not using the swings, "the event of a thread" does not fully exist. When they are in action, the curtain, made of a lightweight silk twill, rises and dips, and the air is stirred, causing further billowing and fluttering. The swings, which are clearly not built for small children, are wide enough to accommodate two, or sometimes even three, adults or adolescents. At the opening on Tuesday evening, people swung singly and in pairs, slow and low or higher and faster, often with helpful pushes from friends. The air filled with sounds of glee punctuated by cellphone rings, which actually sounded great in the general hubbub. And in the middle of it all, the curtain, which resembles a low-cost indoor version of Christo and Jean-Claude's 1972 land art piece "Valley Curtain," was doing its silent, discombobulated dance. In addition, if you paused in your swinging, you could feel the rest of the interconnected system pulse and gyrate, a momentary demonstration - at once silly and profound - that we are, indeed, all connected. Whether all this makes good art, I'm not sure. I don't even know if this is art, participatory theater, a refreshing sociological experiment in how quickly adults will take up childish things, or perhaps a harbinger of the next fitness craze. Maybe it is Ms. Hamilton's belated entry into the audience-centered relational aesthetics phenomenon, a tendency that her earlier work presages. The good news is that the piece seems to bring elements of unpredictability and even fun to a body of work that has often taken itself a bit too seriously. Ms. Hamilton, who represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1999, began her career as a weaver, earning a B.F.A. in textile design at the University of Kansas in 1979 before heading for Yale and an M.F.A. in sculpture. In a sense she is still weaving, but in real time and space, combining objects, language and action so that they intersect suggestively and often poetically. In the early 1990s she became known for tightly controlled, sometimes hauntingly beautiful environments, where solitary performers conducted repetitive, even penitential tasks. "The event of a thread" may be a transitional work from which superior efforts will flow. But for now, the work is complexly participatory and makes wonderful use of the vast volume of the drill hall, from floor to roof, and encompasses experiences both active and contemplative. The swings and curtain are framed and enriched by typically Hamiltonian strands that can seem random and strange until you start weaving them together as you move through the piece. They include a flock of homing pigeons, 42 radios in paper bags that visitors can carry around and listen to, and two people broadcasting snippets of text over those radios. Wearing woolly capes, these rotating "readers" - actors from the theater company SITI - are part of an especially striking tableau: They sit at a sturdy refectory table - handsomely honest, adamantly sculptural furniture is one of Ms. Hamilton's signatures - uncoiling long, scroll-like texts and murmuring into microphones while surrounded by the pigeons. Unusually plump and beautiful, these birds seem crowded and at times stressed by their small, shared cages. The texts, which change daily, are by authors from Aristotle to Charles Darwin to the poet Ann Lauterbach, whose names are posted at the entrance. At the other end of the hall, a solitary writer wearing a plain denim coat is seated at a second table with a pad of paper, jotting down whatever comes to mind. During the Tuesday opening a young writer named Andra Wolowiec was making a good start: "The event of a thread" is on view through Jan. 6 at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, at 66th Street; (212) 616-3930, armoryonpark.org.