Mycelium Is the Message

Thinking in the Neighborhood

Engineering with mycelium presents a somewhat maddening paradox. We want control, yet we are given no choice but to yield to the fungus's agency as part of the process. In learning to design with the physical complexity of mycelium as a medium, we find ourselves not at the center, but on the periphery; in the same neighborhood as the medium, never at its helm. In this, there is an echo of a line from art critic Dave Hickey, who said:

“Criticism is not about art. It is only thinking in the neighborhood of art.”

Hickey didn’t mean critics stand above art to define or contain it. Rather, they hover at the margins, attuned to its contours, responsive to its resonance, but never its master. That hovering, hanging around for the opportunity to derive human-centric value, is precisely the posture a designer or engineer takes when approaching mycelium as a medium.

And just as Hickey insisted that criticism could never quite define an artwork, only orbit around it, similarly the mycelium engineer accepts that the medium will never cede to full enclosure. This defines a space of emergence, co‑agency, and discovery through glancing dialogue. The goal shifts from directing the medium to engaging with its behavior. In that liminal zone, fungal physicality becomes the spirit of the medium that can process, translocate, transform, and evolve. Where human learning and need pass around or through it, and in doing so, value is realized.

Mycelium as Medium

We recently explored this very posture in a new preprint, Morphologically Tunable Mycelium Chips for Physical Reservoir Computing (Telhan et al. 2025). Rather than fabricating a traditional circuit, the work proposes cultivating it; engineering growth conditions to encourage variable morphologies, which are then processed into a substrate for reservoir computing. These mycelium “chips” don’t just carry signals, they transform them. The result is a computational substrate whose behavior emerges from fungal physicality and complexity.

In this system, fungal self-assembly and morphology becomes medium in the McLuhan sense in that it shapes the kinds of signals it can hold, modulate, and remap. The structural memory of growth (the physical memory of its growth context), hypothetically, grants each chip its uniqueness. The medium is not rewritable in real time; it is grown and set, expressing a latent potential, where the vocabulary of reservoirs becomes addressable through the breadth of phenotypic plasticity and scale. 

When a signal passes through one of these chips, it interacts not with logic gates or code, but with history-rich mycologically authored form. Each signal is bent and scattered by that form’s memory, producing a transformed output. In this way, the mycelium chip acts as a kind of physical kernel, where complexity becomes a lens rather than a barrier. It echoes Hickey’s idea: that value does not reside in domination or definition, but is realized through proximity; through what moves around, alongside, or within the neighborhood of this computational medium.

Living Networks as Medium

The living network itself exhibits similar capacities for information and signal transformation. Fungal networks exhibit authentic electrical activity capable of encoding and transmitting information. At the hyphal tip, ionic currents flow in response to nutrient gradients, with ions entering the cell and looping back through the extracellular matrix, feeding both electrical and pH fields that mirror cell growth morphology (Limozin et al. 2000). These electrical potentials may underpin coordinated mycelial behavior. Recent reviews affirm that fungi can generate action potential–like signals and systemic electrical potentials, suggesting they might use such signals to integrate stimuli and coordinate growth across the network (Buffi et al. 2025). Electrical spikes, interpreted as binary inputs and outputs, allow the colony to perform basic logic gate operations (Adamatzky et al. 2020). Taken together, these findings reveal living mycelium as an electrically active and information-rich medium, in which computation, signal propagation, and morphological feedback are entangled features of its adaptive structure.

Mycelium is not only biologically and electrically complex, but physically tunable. Its properties can be modulated. Recent work shows that additive-free mycelium composites can achieve a remarkably wide range of elastic moduli, spanning two orders of magnitude depending on fungal strain and growth protocol, without sacrificing biodegradability (Danninger et al. 2022). Similarly, mycelium’s porosity, hyphal density, and water content directly affect its electrical resistivity and dielectric behavior, providing functional handles for tuning its response as a signal-processing medium (Adamatzky et al. 2020). These studies underscore mycelium’s potential as a responsive, designable, and expressive physical medium.

Engineering as Signal

To interact with mycelium as a medium is to remain, like Hickey’s critic, in the neighborhood of mycelium, and by virtue find a dialogue with it. The critic does not extract the meaning of a work, nor engineer its composition. Instead, they move through shared space as a signal themselves, shaped by the work's contours and responding with thought and language that ripple across its surface without ever subsuming it. 

So too the mycelium engineer. We are not agents of the mycelium, nor its authors; we are signals passing through the same space, influenced by its structure, shaping in return, but never in full command. To work in the neighborhood of the medium is to allow our own ideas, needs, and designs to interact with fungal complexity, and from that interaction, value emerges. That entanglement of morphology and signal, agency and input, memory and interaction transforms complexity into information, and medium into meaning.

References

Telhan O, Winiski J, Schaak D, Siegel M, Petrillo N, Bayer E. Morphologically tunable mycelium chips for physical reservoir computing (2025). bioRxiv. doi:10.1101/2025.08.20.671348

Limozin, L., & Denet, B. (2000). Quantitative analysis of concentration gradient and ionic currents associated with hyphal tip growth in fungi. Phys. Rev. E, 62, 4067–4076. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.62.4067.

Buffi M, Kelliher JM, Robinson A, Junier P, [et al.]. Electrical signaling in fungi: past and present challenges. FEMS Microbiol Rev. 2025;49:fuaf009. doi:10.1093/femsre/fuaf009.

Adamatzky A, Tegelaar M, Wosten HAB, Powell AL, Beasley AE, Mayne R. On Boolean gates in fungal colony. Biosystems. 2020 Jun;193-194:104138. doi: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2020.104138. Epub 2020 Apr 4. PMID: 32259561.

Danninger D, Pruckner R, Holzinger L, Koeppe R, Kaltenbrunner M. MycelioTronics: Fungal mycelium skin for sustainable electronics. Sci Adv. 2022 Nov 11;8(45):eadd7118. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.add7118.

The views expressed in this article are my own and do not represent those of any current or past employers. All content is written and published in a personal capacity and reflects independent perspectives based on professional experience. No confidential or proprietary information is shared.