Through the Petri Glass:

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest global health and development challenges of our generation! So why isn’t AMR at the forefront of public discourse?

Through the Petri Glass is a carefully curated group of 20 artists, innovators and AMR experts collaboratively imagining how artistic intervention – with an initial focus on interactive and immersive storytelling – can help augment the reality of antimicrobial resistance for policymakers and the public.

We are excited to hold this event during World AMR Awareness Week, a global campaign celebrated annually to improve awareness and understanding of AMR and encourage best practices. In contrast to many high-level meetings around AMR that bring together scientists and policymakers, our focus is on artists, storytellers, and curators interested in moving the AMR conversation forward. A secondary goal is to bring together people working in this space who have not had the opportunity to come together before.

Participants at the workshop will explore telling human stories through next-generation technologies including WebXR and generative AI, share collective insights on health communications for live and virtual audiences, and ideate for an interactive intervention that ignites awareness and accelerates global action on AMR. We encourage participants to share their own experiments and successes around health communication more generally and AMR specifically. All participant IP brought to the workshop remains your own, of course – but we also hope to collaboratively develop some ideas upon which all of us can build.

The workshop will be an opportunity to imagine and ideate around experiences that can resonate with specific local communities but can also scale. What experience would you create for your own communities? What experiences have the potential to reach millions of people globally – including in lower-resourced settings? We are interested in surfacing art and storytelling structures that have the capacity to increase public understanding of AMR, mobilise diverse communities to act on a personal, community and political level, and create opportunities to learn.

We do not have funding for our potential interventions at this time. Our hope is that ideas arising from this event will soon lead to funded initiatives, collaboratively developed by participants interested in continuing conversations beyond the initial workshop. We will decide as a group exactly how we might move forward with collectively developed ideas.