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, 2024).
David Hickey was an American art critic and cultural essayist known for writing about art with unusual intimacy, wit, and democratic force. His criticism resisted the posture of authority hovering above the artwork. He approached art as something encountered, lived with, argued beside, and thought near. When Hickey wrote that criticism is “thinking in the neighborhood of art,” he was describing a practice of proximity rather than mastery: the critic moves around the work, attuned to its contours, responsive to its resonance, allowing value to emerge through sustained attention. 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 explored this very posture in the paper 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: the medium is not a neutral carrier of information, but an active condition that shapes the scale, form, and meaning of what passes through it (McLuhan, 1994). A mycelium chip does not simply transmit an input signal like a wire. It receives that signal through a grown body whose density, branching, porosity, hydration, continuity, and processing history determine how the signal is delayed, scattered, dampened, amplified, or remapped. The message, then, is inseparable from the material form that transforms it. The structural memory of growth, meaning the physical trace of its growth context, helps define each chip’s 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 have been reported to exhibit electrical activity, and recent work has investigated whether such activity can support information encoding, signal transmission, and unconventional computation. At the hyphal tip, concentration gradients and ionic currents are associated with polarized fungal growth, linking electrical and chemical fields to the morphology of active tip extension (Limozin et al., 2000). These electrical potentials may underpin coordinated mycelial behavior. Recent reviews synthesize evidence that filamentous fungi can generate action potential–like signals and electrical currents, while also emphasizing that the biological function and reliable measurement of these signals remain active challenges (Buffi et al., 2025). In one unconventional-computing study, extracellular electrical spikes were interpreted as binary inputs and outputs to derive sets of implementable two-input logic gates in a fungal colony model (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 on fungal mycelium skins shows that processed mycelium can serve as a biodegradable substrate for sustainable electronic devices, supporting the broader claim that fungal physicality can be engineered into functional material platforms (Danninger et al., 2022). Similarly, fungal colonies and mycelium-bound composites have been investigated as electrically active, nonlinear substrates, including Boolean-gate implementations derived from fungal electrical spiking behavior (Adamatzky et al., 2020). Moisture content is one important handle in this emerging design space: Phillips et al. (2023) showed that changes in the moisture content of mycelium-bound composites are associated with measurable changes in fungal electrical activity. Together, 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. The critic moves through shared space with the work, allowing its contours to shape thought and language. Meaning arises through proximity, attention, and response; through contact with a structure that changes the signal passing near it.
So too the mycelium engineer. Our designs, measurements, geometries, substrates, and needs enter the fungal system as signals. They meet a living structure with its own history, morphology, constraints, and agency. The outcome is shaped by what the organism can receive, filter, amplify, dampen, and remap through the body it has grown.
This clarifies the central point: a medium carries by transforming. Its structure determines what can be expressed through it. Paper, clay, code, circuit, culture, and mycelium each impose a grammar on what passes through them. The medium gives the signal a body, and that body changes the signal’s possible meanings.
The concept of mycelium chips makes this principle literal. Morphological variety itself functions as a transformation function. A signal enters the grown structure and is altered by the density, branching, porosity, continuity, hydration, and history of that structure. The chip’s usefulness depends on the fact that fungal morphology is variable, structured, and physically consequential. Its complexity gives the signal something to encounter.
To work in the neighborhood of the medium is to design for that encounter. Value emerges when our intentions pass through fungal complexity and come back altered into form, pattern, structure, or function. Morphology changes signal. Signal changes interpretation. Interpretation changes design. In that entanglement of morphology and input, agency and response, memory and interaction, complexity becomes information, and medium becomes meaning.
References
Adamatzky, A., Tegelaar, M., Wösten, H. A. B., Powell, A. L., Beasley, A. E., & Mayne, R. (2020). On Boolean gates in fungal colony. BioSystems, 193–194, Article 104138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2020.104138
Buffi, M., Kelliher, J. M., Robinson, A. J., Gonzalez, D., Cailleau, G., Macalindong, J. A., Frau, E., Schintke, S., Chain, P. S. G., Stanley, C. E., Künzler, M., Bindschedler, S., & Junier, P. (2025). Electrical signaling in fungi: Past and present challenges. FEMS Microbiology Reviews, 49, Article fuaf009. https://doi.org/10.1093/femsre/fuaf009
Danninger, D., Pruckner, R., Holzinger, L., Koeppe, R., & Kaltenbrunner, M. (2022). MycelioTronics: Fungal mycelium skin for sustainable electronics. Science Advances, 8(45), Article eadd7118. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add7118
Hickey, D. (2024). Feint of heart: Art writings, 1982–2002 (J. Earnest, Ed.). David Zwirner Books.
Limozin, L., & Denet, B. (2000). Quantitative analysis of concentration gradient and ionic currents associated with hyphal tip growth in fungi. Physical Review E, 62(3), 4067–4076. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.62.4067
McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding media: The extensions of man. MIT Press. (Original work published 1964)
Phillips, N., Gandia, A., & Adamatzky, A. (2023). Electrical response of fungi to changing moisture content. Fungal Biology and Biotechnology, 10, Article 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40694-023-00155-0
Telhan, O., Winiski, J., Schaak, D., Siegel, M., Petrillo, N., & Bayer, E. (2025). Morphologically tunable mycelium chips for physical reservoir computing. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.20.671348