“Eye contact is about connecting,” says Jeremy Mulder (left). “You’re being seen. We smile, welcome them. We’ve created a healthy healing space. There’s no alcohol. We’re not going to bars. We’re two guys who figured out this game.” | Photo by Mark Bialek
About once a week, they tape large sheets of paper on either side of “Graffiti Alley” by the Michigan Theater. One says “eye contact” and the other “smiles.” For several hours, they make a mark every time a passerby responds.
“It started as a thing to just get out and have some fun, and try to connect with people,” says Hess. When they met in March 2023 at Hyperion Coffee downtown, both had some free time, and were looking for creative connection. “We found we had similar creative energies and minds,” says Hess. They quickly became fast friends and collaborators. They fired off lots of different ideas for projects but decided they “had to come up with something we can do right now—something real simple to just get out here and try to connect somehow.”
So they stationed themselves in the alley, alongside Instagrammers taking selfies, the unhoused, and passing theatergoers. They call it an art project, but it’s more than that. They’re collecting what Mulder calls “micro moments of magic.”
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On a recent evening, someone passes and catches Hess’s eye. He smiles and says, “Hi there!” and the person smiles back. Hess and Mulder each add a mark to their tally sheet.
Mulder says they don’t try to engage passersby in conversation, or coax a smile or a meeting of eyes. “We just stand here, just kind of hanging out.
“I believe that the energy that I put out is enough,” he says. “We’re not selling anything to anybody. I think that’s part of it, too. We’re all used to people either staring at us, trying to make eye contact or smiling at us … because they want something.”
Walkers immersed in their phones avoid eye contact and in-person engagement. Hess and Mulder are doing their part to reverse that.
Jeremy Mulder, left, and Adam Hess explain their “Micro Moments of Magic” to Marcelle Duffau of Baton Rouge, Louisiana at Graffiti Alley on Liberty. | Photo by Mark Bialek
“I can recall all of the times I was a part of a smile or an interaction, and it brings me such joy,” says Hess. “In my opinion, what we are doing is building this safe space for people to be curious, maybe join in the creative fun—in this little moment—maybe change their trajectory just a little bit, and their day just a little bit, to get them out of the funk they’ve been in, or take the blinders off that have been on for so long.”
Hess was a cardiac critical care nurse and then a Covid nurse but says he “stepped away” when his son was born in 2021. (His wife, Natalie Hess, is a Realtor.) He cared for their son, “did some writing and other things,” and “now I help other nurses overcome burnout through personalized self-care practices and creative mindset coaching.” Once his son started preschool, he had some time on his hands.
Mulder, who has a son in middle school, was in a similar place. He says he’s a “recovering lawyer” who recognized that intellectual property work “was not my calling in life.” He’s currently a fractional chief customer officer who consults for startups.
“I grew up here, moved to Silicon Valley and lived there for a dozen years and then came back and promised myself I would bring the color and all of the wonderful things about Ann Arbor from my upbringing—but also what I learned out there” into his renewed life here.
He pauses to say “thank you” to a passerby, tally one more smile, and smile in return. After more than a year, they have filled lots and lots of white sheets with count marks. Is that art?
“We’re not sure,” he admits. “We’ve actually put them [all] up on a couple of occasions, but it takes so long to put so many sheets up.”
But it’s really not about the sheets or the tallying. “Eye contact is about connecting,” says Mulder. “You’re being seen. We smile, welcome them. We’ve created a healthy healing space. There’s no alcohol. We’re not going to bars. We’re two guys who figured out this game.”
“Some art projects are finite, this one is not,” he adds in a text. “The project continues in both graffiti alley and elsewhere; graffiti alley will remain the main location, but we’ve been leaning into trying other locations around Ann Arbor, too. See our Instagram (@micromomentsofmagic) for examples of where else we’ve been popping up.”
For National Nurses Week in May, they stationed themselves outside Trinity Health Ann Arbor during shift change. Someone called security and they had to leave—but they’d already collected 391 eye contacts and 330 smiles.