Robert Lippok
Composer, Performer, Curator
Which sound is special for you?
Not a sound, but rather an acoustic situation: the forest.
In my artistic practice, I often deal with thresholds, in-between spaces.
In the forest, sound shatters across an open-closed space. Branches, trunks, and air break each noise into fragments. The forest listens by dispersing – each sound momentary, splintered, suspended between exposure and enclosure.
Does (your) music need a secure or safe space?
My music doesn‘t need a safe space in the conventional sense. It needs a space where uncertainty is possible – where structures can dissolve and reassemble. I’m drawn to environments that allow friction, vulnerability, even failure. Safety, for me, lies in the freedom to risk something, to unmake form in order to discover it anew.
What instrument has yet to be invented?
An instrument that has yet to be invented is one that plays not just sound, but potential – a system that responds to space, gesture, material tension, and memory in real time. Not a fixed interface, but a fluid, evolving architecture. An instrument that listens as much as it speaks. Perhaps not even an object, but a situation – where composition, environment, and performer blur into one unstable sonic organism. Something between a score, a structure, and a resonance field.
Born in 1966 in East Berlin. Robert Lippok has been working as a musician, visual artist and stage designer since the late 1980s, creating multimedia installations in which he combines various media such as sound, film, photography and collage, often making reference to architectural and spiritual spaces. He was a member of experimental band projects such as “Ornament & Verbrechen” (Robert Lippok/Ronald Lippok) and “To Rococo Rot” (Lippok/Lippok/Stefan Schneider) and works for theater and opera productions, exhibition projects and collaborations with artists. In 2024, he was represented with a work at the German Pavilion curated by Çağla Ilk at the Venice Biennale.