Both in Canada and globally, Conceptual Art is indelibly marked by the 1960s post-war political unrest that gave birth to anti-war protests and the student, womenʼs, civil rights and gay liberation movements. It was also informed by the emergence of new information technologies such as the television, the fax machine and the computer. Rebelling against the idea that art was a matter of individual expression, special skill, or purely visual and formal concerns, the conceptual movement emphasized art as ʻidea,ʼ in what has come to be known as artʼs linguistic turn.

Artists no longer wanted to simply add objects (paintings, sculptures, monuments) to a world already too full of ʻthings,ʼ particularly when new information systems, technologies and recording devices, such as video cameras, offered far more interesting and challenging possibilities. Asserting that a work no longer even needed to actually be produced in order to exist, or even be perceived, Conceptual Art came to exist as a kind of meta-art in the form of statements and writings about art itself and a critical engagement with the new systems of meaning-making in the age of mass media through the deployment of print media, radio, and television, as well as formats now identified as precursors of digital networks.