Blade Runner

I spent an inspiring evening with Just at Ars Electronica '96, in Linz. He, like Jim Whiting, Chip Flynn, Liz Young, and the rest of the all-star cast of amok tinkerers at that year's Ars, had been ghettoized in the suitably gothic ruins of Voest – for fear, presumably, that their grease-monkey art would soil the Armaniwear of the artistocracy, not to mention the prospective corporate underwriters power-lunching at the festival's main hall. Lit by the welding torches of other artists working out the last-minute kinks in their contraptions, Just held forth from his wheelchair, effusing about the works-in-progress and surveying the infernal machines around him with something like paternal pride.

Just's contribution (with the help of collaborators Sam Auinger and Rudolf Heidebrecht) to Ars '96 was a propeller equipped with an electric motor and two antique loudspeakers. The motor’s struggles against the wind spinning the propeller were converted into acoustic signals and transmitted through the old loudspeakers, artifacts of propaganda campaigns. Located on the site that was slated, in Hitler's dreams, for a future Museum of German Electrical Engineering, Just's installation was, in the words of the Ars catalogue, "a kind of anti-propaganda." It was also a gloriously noisy monument to the slacker hacker ethos – the post-industrial article of faith that work sucks, play rules, and what the world needs now is more pointless, profitless basement tinkering that flips an index finger at revenue streams and return-on-investment.

Heckert, who participated in Ars '96, remembers, "I've never met anyone like Just. We first came into contact in 1988. He came over to my place [in San Francisco], we talked for a while, and the next day he asked me if I would make some aluminum wing/blades that would spring out from the wheels on his chair, 'Ya know, like the ones on the chariots in Ben Hur.' At that moment, I realized I was with a different sort of person."

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