Oslo's Munch museum has opened Connect the Lines, an interactive exhibition that turns the Norwegian artist's enormous archive of drawings into something visitors can play with. Munch sketched almost daily, leaving behind more than 7,000 drawings, but the sheets are too fragile to display in large numbers. The new show, which builds on an earlier project called New Snow, looks for a way to open up that archive without putting the originals at risk.

The centre of the show is a drawing task. Visitors sketch whatever they like on touchscreens, and an artificial-intelligence system studies each drawing for similarities in form, colour and motif, then pairs it with a corresponding sketch by Munch. Every match brings another of the artist's drawings out of the archive, so the collection is revealed gradually, one visitor at a time. An animation of the full digital archive runs alongside, and a live data screen at the gallery entrance keeps count of how many visitor drawings have been made and how many of Munch's sketches have been discovered.

London-based graphic design studio Intercity designed the show's visual identity. Geometric background animations mixed with soft, rounded shapes move across the touchscreens, pulsing when idle, stretching as visitors scroll and rotating when they share a match. A palette of pink, orange and green runs through the posters and signage, a deliberately contemporary counterpoint to Munch's small character sketches, affectionately known as mascots. Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen, the museum's curator of contemporary art, said the design had to do far more than look good: it had to turn a digital drawing installation into an experience visitors could feel their way through.

The result treats participation as the point rather than an add-on. Instead of standing before a fixed set of fragile works, visitors leave with a personal connection to a specific drawing, and the archive grows more visible with every sketch made. Connect the Lines is on display at Munch until 29 November.