Why isn’t AMR at the forefront of public discourse—despite being one of the greatest global health and development challenges of our time?
In November 2024, an exciting two-day workshop, Through the Petri Glass, brought together artists, innovators, and AMR policy experts to explore how interactive and immersive storytelling can transform public and policymaker understanding of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
In 2025, we supported three bold new projects that reimagine how we tell the story of drug-resistant infections. Each one seeks to inform, engage, and inspire action—locally and globally. Together, they are Art x AMR.
Unlike many efforts that focus primarily on scientists and decision-makers, this initiative puts artists, storytellers, and curators at the centre—those working on the frontlines of culture and communication.
Our aim is simple: to move the AMR conversation from research into action—using art, community engagement, and creative media. By grounding AMR in lived experience—through play, memory, and myth—we hope to spark not only awareness but meaningful change.
Live-scribe illustrations by Patience Rose Nottingham/We Are Cognitive
Photos of participants at the 2024 Through the Petri Glass workshop
Meet the Teams
Genesis 1928
What if penicillin… was never discovered?
This speculative storytelling project uses time travel to imagine a world without antibiotics, beginning in 1928 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. Through carefully curated and playful conversations in multiple global settings — from UK hospitals to Amazonian villages and Ugandan waterways to Indian pharmacies— local characters and local microbes will explore the consequences of a world untouched by antibiotic advances.
These conversations, inspired by methods like Wellcome’s Responsive Dialogues, will be recorded and adapted into an immersive experience, reflecting community-driven visions of health, loss, sustenance and resistance. Co-created alternative realities shaped by local wisdom and modern crises will encourage a rethinking of our relationship with the microbial world.
Microbial Realms: The Resistance Rising
Microbial Realms: The Resistance Rising is a fantasy-meets-reality game experience inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. This pilot project places players in the heart of a futuristic superbug-themed world! Participants become Microbiowizards, Antibiotic Alchemists, and Public Health Bards, navigating challenges as a team across hospital wards, abandoned pharmaceutical factories and industrial farms.
With “resistance meters” instead of health points, players learn how their decisions are critical to the emergence (or defeat) of superbugs. This live-action, semi-facilitated game will be developed for public exhibitions, classrooms, and eventually a tabletop game format for long-term use.
Surgeon X: Immersive
A darkly comic medical thriller goes global.
A reimagining of the acclaimed Surgeon X comic (2016), this web-based experience will expand the original story through new interactive layers: animations, documentary clips, podcasts, and personal stories of people affected by AMR worldwide.
Partnering with teams in India and South Africa, and the Fleming Initiative in the UK, this interdisciplinary project blends humour, politics, and real-world science. Audiences will engage with a “Digital Wall of Resistance”—a space to share memories, experiences, and community-driven solutions to address AMR.
Coordinating Team
About the Labs
Since 2015, the Immersive Storytelling Lab (ISL) has worked with members of the Global Strategy Lab on large-scale, interdisciplinary global projects that bring together artists, scientists, health practitioners and policy makers to tackle 21st century challenges. Immune Nations, a multi-year project funded through the Research Council of Norway, mounted international research-based exhibitions exploring the role that art can play in difficult and divisive social and political topics such as global vaccination.
For ten years, the Global Strategy Lab (GSL) has undertaken innovative research to advise governments and public health organizations on how to design laws, policies, and institutions that make the world a healthier place for everyone. GSL is the home of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Global Governance of Antimicrobial Resistance and the policy-research think tank the AMR Policy Accelerator.
Resources
The webinar “Resistance Reimagined: Storytelling Meets Science” shared behind the scenes glimpses of the three Art x AMR projects during the 2025 World AMR Awareness Week.
Explore Beyond Words: Creative Ways to Tell the AMR Story, a slideshow of AMR-related art shared before the start of the 2025 webinar.
One year earlier… flashback to our first webinar during World AMR Awareness Week 2024, culminating a two-day workshop with artists, storytellers, curators and researchers at the Wellcome Trust in London.
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