About

A cash machine stands in an empty white room. It has been set to pay out into a fire.

The work

Money is an agreement we renew without noticing: paper and ink, a figure in someone else’s ledger, a promise that the next person will take it too. Burn Your Money asks for a minute in which the agreement is set aside. You choose a sum. The machine counts it out. The fire takes it the way it takes anything.

The machine pays out one burn at a time, and whoever is here watches it. If someone else’s is on when yours is paid, yours waits its turn in a short line, and then everyone watches yours.

What stays is a line in a public ledger: an amount, and a name, or Anonymous.

The receipt

When yours leaves the machine, a letter follows it: the sum, the hour it went into the fire, and the line it holds in the ledger. It is the only paper the machine gives back. Keep it, or don’t.

Carbon

A fire puts carbon into the air. So a tenth of every burn goes the other way: ten percent of what the work takes in pays for permanent carbon removal, through Stripe Climate. What goes up in smoke here helps draw carbon back down somewhere else.

Taking part

The ledger

Just burned lists each burn as it leaves the machine: the amount, and the name you chose or Anonymous. It never shows emails, card details or payment references.

Names

Everyone watching reads the name on the screen, so slurs, abuse, web addresses and impersonation are turned away, and any that slip through are taken down.

Payment

Handled by Stripe, on this page; card details never reach the site. You are paying for a burn: the machine counts out your sum, sets it alight in front of everyone watching, and enters it in the ledger. Once it has paid out, a burn can’t be undone.

Your email

Used once, for the receipt. The ledger doesn’t record it.

Reversals

If a payment is refunded, or a dispute over it is lost, its line comes out of the ledger. The record is kept.

Visits

Counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and keeps no profile of you.

Colophon

Set in Bodoni Moda and Inter. Made for burnyour.money. Sources and licences for the materials in the work are kept with its source files.