Mr. Stern’s life was as colorful, confusing and sometimes chaotic as his art. He was born Gerd Jacob Stern in Oct. 12, 1928, to a Jewish family in the Saar, a German-speaking region administered by France and Britain under a mandate from the League of Nations. After the Saar was incorporated into Nazi Germany in 1935, Mr. Stern’s father, Otto, a cheese importer, moved his family to New York City, where he re-established his business.

Mr. Stern attended the Bronx High School of Science and the City College of New York with the intention of studying zoology, but he left after a few weeks. His subsequent stay at Black Mountain College, the experimental interdisciplinary school in North Carolina, where he planned to study poetry, was even briefer. Its rector, the painter Josef Albers, was, Mr. Stern recalled, “out of the same mold as my father: the Germanic disciplinarian.”

“I couldn’t take it,” he said, “so I split.”

He was, however, strongly influenced by other Black Mountain instructors, including Buckminster Fuller and John Cage.

It was through Cage that Mr. Stern was introduced to Marshall McLuhan’s theories, reading the manuscript of what would be published in 1964 as “Understanding Media,” McLuhan’s oracular treatise on the impact television and other modes of communication had on human consciousness.

At this point, Mr. Stern recalled, his poems turned nonlinear, “running off the paper into collage and lights and sounds.” He turned words into slide shows, pasted words around three-dimensional objects and, with the installation “Contact Is the Only Love,” constructed a device to blitz viewers with assorted word images.