Stern's video art tends to be in a performative writing style, where he often plays out characters he has created, or uses found footage from films, to explore the fragility of language. He has also worked on collaborative multimedia performances that explore similar issues, usually with more explicit political messages, such as challenging the discourse surrounding HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Stern's interventionist projects are always site-specific, playful and political. In his "Wireframe Series", for example, he has volunteers from the streets of Dubrovnik, Croatia or Johannesburg, South Africa, physically erect temporary, 3D architectural structures made of rope. Each of these custom "public spaces" are "activated" only through their "contact with people," and take on different meanings in each context. And in "Doin' my Part to Lighten the Load", Stern challenges power relations between artists and critics, and black and white — as well as electrical "power structures" — by convincing South African arts writer, and editor of Art South Africa magazine, Sean O'Toole, to give up electricity for 24 hours; Stern hired workers off the street to follow O'Toole around his apartment with hand-crank generators and bulbs for the evening. Stern's "Distill Life" works, multimedia collaborations with Milwaukee artist Jessica Meuninck-Ganger that began in 2009, combine various forms of traditional printmaking with video and machinima. Here the artists "mount translucent prints and drawings on top of video monitors, which appear to bring moving images to life on paper." According to Chris Roper of South Africa's Mail and Guardian, "The work is funny, pretty and accessible, but it’s also complicated, surprising, exceedingly well crafted and rewards a long-term relationship." The works pay homage to and cite a number of artists, including Diego Velázquez, Katsushika Hokusai, Eadweard Muybridge, Claude Monet, Jan van Eyck, William Kentridge, Utagawa Hiroshige and others. And Stern's Second Life-based mixed reality art work explores "the juxtaposition of old and new media and illuminates the possibilities and limitations of both." "Given Time," for example, enacts a permanent "connection between two simulated people staring wordlessly at each other across real space." According to John Mitchell, Stern uses "Second Life as a medium much like oil paint or marble, hand-drawing two Second Life avatars and pulling them from out of their universe and into ours.