Postcard Challenge

Brought to you by: Rietberg Museum

Game type: Single-player game

Duration: Flexible

Used by: Rietberg Museum

A Ragamala combines Indian music, poetry, and painting. Before the opening of the exhibition, the Postcard Challenge invited visitors hear, view, and read individual components of the Ragamalas and respond to them with their own compositions, drawings, and poems on postcards. The aim was to increase the visibility of the upcoming exhibition and to arouse curiosity about an art form that is still unknown to many.

• How it Works

  In this interactive setting, participants were presented with two of three elements of a Ragamala - such as a piece of music and an image, or an image and a poem - presented on stamped postcards addressed to the museum.

  They were invited to imagine and create the missing third component in the form of short musical compositions which they could upload via a QR code, drawings, or poems, and sent the postcard back to the museum.

  By combining reception with creation, the game encouraged playful experimentation, while making an unfamiliar art form accessible and sparking curiosity about the upcoming exhibition.

• What You Need

  • Ability to print and distribute paper activities

  • Landing page if people should be able to upload musical pieces

  • Strategy to distribute postcards (for the PlayTest, museum staff distributed postcards among friends and families)

• Who Is This For?

  • All ages

• How to Get Started

  If you need help developing a new instance of Postcard Challenge, please reach out to friends@projectami.com