SYDNEY.- Telstra Business and the Museum of Contemporary Art have joined forces on a project that brings digital and video artworks into the company’s high-tech Sydney headquarters.

The collaboration comes nine years after Telstra’s first association with the MCA to sponsor free admission to the museum.

Like many Australian companies, Telstra has been divesting its traditional corporate art collection. The walls of its modern Sydney boardroom and the adjoining Telstra Experience Centre have since remained bare – until now.

This week Telstra Business, the small to medium business arm of Telstra Corporation, partnered with Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art to display a selection of video and digital art by some of Australia’s most promising emerging and established artists.

Telstra Business Group Managing Director, Deena Shiff, said the decision to take digital art into the corporate world was based on the fact that art and technology have never before been more closely linked, with digital arts fast becoming one of Australia’s most important emerging industries.

“Australia boasts one of the world’s most creative and fast-growing digital arts industries and it is selling itself to the world thanks to high-speed broadband technology, so our futures are very much entwined,” Ms Shiff said.

"Many of our customers work are now digital businesses such as creative designers, movie animation studios, TV and film post production houses and advertising agencies just to name a few.”

The digital installations displayed at the Telstra Experience Centre are part of the Show Reel-Show Real project organised jointly by the MCA and Telstra Business to introduce their customers to digital art. The project highlights artworks by four Australian contemporary artists: Kate Murphy, Jess McNeil, TV Moore and Susan Norrie.

The moving image works presented cover a diverse range of subjects including crime figure Arthur ‘Neddy’ Smith, the steps of the Sydney Opera House, Australia’s Wonderland ferris wheel and boats on the Ganges River in India.

“It’s an extraordinary array of moving images and different worlds, some captured by multiple, synchronized video cameras and others digitized to create eye-catching effects,” Ms Shiff said.

MCA Director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor said: “We are delighted to be re-establishing our relationship with Telstra on this project.

“The MCA and Telstra have a proud history stretching back to Telstra’s sponsorship of free admission in 2000, which helped introduce a wider audience to contemporary art. Since then, MCA attendances have grown fourfold to over half a million visitors per year.

“We both agreed it was time to re-kindle the relationship, especially considering the MCA’s redevelopment plans which will see the Museum wired up for the digital future – a sign of where we’re both heading,’ Ms McGregor said.