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, a new initiative brought together artists, innovators, and AMR experts to explore how interactive and immersive storytelling can transform public and policymaker understanding of 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
In 2025, we’re supporting three bold new projects that reimagine how we tell the story of AMR. Each one seeks to inform, engage, and inspire action—locally and globally.
Genesis 1928 Team
The Microbial Realm:
The Resistance Rising Team
Surgeon X: Immersive Team
Coordinating Team
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.
The Microbial Realm: The Resistance Rising
The Microbial Realm: 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.
- Mairead Ruane: Producer
- Sara Kenney: Writer/ Co-Lead
- Sarah Iqbal: Co-Lead India
- Vanessa Carter: Patient Producer (AMR Narrative)
- Michael Mensah-Bonsu: Digital Producer
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