Sternberg's paintings often let the environment act as a collaborator: for the 2017 exhibition “the windward side of the island” at MAMA Gallery in Berlin, he dragged canvases through the Pacific Ocean along the windward side of Santa Catalina Island, letting the water fade and reshape the paint into geometric patterns.⁵ He returned to this method of working with natural elements in 2026, burying, rain-exposing and flagpole-flying paintings for along the high embankments, a site-specific installation made with Los Angeles Nomadic Division at Presqu'ile Winery in Santa Maria Valley, California.⁶ In his 2020 exhibition “FreeState” at ESMoA, he staged the Free Republic of California, an invented nation-state complete with its own constitution, budget, clothing and billboards spread across the museum.^4,7,8 The show closed with owls stirred the silence here and there, an installation he described as feeling romantic and immersive even as it decayed with the rising tide.⁹ His work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the El Segundo Museum of Art and the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania.^1,2,4

In 2023 he released his first generative artwork, chaos comes with the summer haze, on Art Blocks, developed by dragging large paintings through the ocean until the brushstrokes dissolved and encoding the resulting patterns of light, bark and reptile skin into a generative system.² In 2025 he created A Garden, a generative LED installation for Giga, the joint UNICEF and International Telecommunication Union initiative to connect every school in the world to the internet, presented at Paris Photo 2025. The work turned real-time school-connectivity data into a monumental composition on a giant LED monolith, making each connected school a unique visual signature.¹⁰