OFF THE BEAT: FRALEY’S ROBOT REPAIR SHOP

If you’re traveling and find yourself booked through the Pittsburgh International Airport, it would be a good place to drop off your robot to be repaired. Well, not really, but the futuristic notion is fun to entertain, and one that has engaged thousands of travelers and fans over the past two years.

Fraley’s Robot Repair Shop is an art installation. It is the brainchild of artist Toby Atticus Fraley, and well worth plotting out enough time to traverse Concourse A on the third floor between gates A10 and A12 to visit and behold.

The installation began as a part of “Project Pop-Up: Downtown,” a municipal arts program launched in November of 2011 that was intended to reinvigorate a declining section of Pittsburgh which had a lot of vacant spaces. The installation stayed in place until May 2013, garnering the Mayor’s Award for Public Art and winning the hearts of Pittsburghers who frequently peered through the Shop’s storefront window to view the retro-futuristic scene of partially dismantled humanoid robots amid fanciful repair-related items, and other eccentric paraphernalia inside.

“When the space was downtown,” Toby says, “I was going down like every eleven days because people who live and work downtown saw it daily so I really felt that I had to adjust it a lot.” Even frequent flyers wouldn’t see the piece that regularly at the airport but, “I still go out about every month and a half and change it up a little bit. Maybe holiday-theme it, or if there’s a local special event I try to tie it in.” He describes the installation’s vibe when it was downtown as being “kind of gritty.” When the time came, “It was a little sad to move out,” Fraley says, but the urban revitalization was a success. “The street started to get a little brighter,” he says, and a restaurant bought the building and moved in. “It’s a good restaurant too, so I can’t complain,” Fraley adds. (Its name is Butcher in the Rye.)

After the downtown installation folded, Fraley created a social media narrative that left the Shop’s most prominent occupant - whom fans of the installation and “Satisfied Customers” at pitrobotrepair.com sometimes call the “Lonely Robot” - last seen, at the time, boarding a Greyhound bus to California. So, after a successful Kickstarter funding campaign, when the Robot Repair Shop was reborn, how did the Lonely Robot return to Pittsburgh? “That’s sort of a mystery. I never explained that,” Toby admits.

What matters is that Lonely, and the Shop, are at the airport. “I grew up a huge aviation fan,” says Pittsburgh-born-and-raised Fraley. “It’s weird thinking back to the Toby who was seven years old,” says the 40-year-old artist, “and would always stare at planes flying overhead… This is not just another art installation for me. This was kind of an important one for me.”

The installation is booked for at least the next three years, and Fraley has been busy with other projects. 2016 saw his mixed media/electronic sculpture “The Archivist: I will not let you fade away” as the winner of the Five Years Out Art Challenge. Currently, his Artwork Forge II – a “machine” that researches and produces for a patron, in just a few minutes, a customized piece of art based on personal preferences and social trends - is installed outside City Hall in Palo Alto, CA until March 2018.

These days, we don’t generally repair things; we replace them. Toby reflects, “That was kind of a thought in my head… because I was tired of seeing things get thrown away all the time. I was thinking that maybe in the future we’d get more attached to some humanoid form, to seeing that robot around the house, and wouldn’t want to pitch it.” The Robot Repair Shop is a resonant homage to an ideal – that may or may not ever exist - of the importance of the interplay of good technology, fine workmanship, and sentiment for the things that work so hard for us.