On 7 March the K Foundation screened Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid in the Northampton living room of writer and occultist Alan Moore. They were interested in his opinion of the burning within a magical context. The following is an edited transcript of his responses.

I thought it was awesome in some ways, very funny in others; quite liberating. It burned well - very clean flames. I'd like to know if it was Newton on the fifties, but he's represented anyway - he organised the Royal Mint, and that's interesting because Newton was kind of the bridge between Magic and The Age of Reason. On the one hand he was an alchemist and yet, on the other, he was the father of all contemporary science. He had the last remaining stone maypole in London made into the base of his telescope.

William Blake called the Age of Reason 'Newton's sleep', the falling asleep to anything beyond rationality and reason ... spiritual values. This film was Newton's bed clothes on fire. It's what money represents which is the important thing magically. Anyone's probable immediate reaction is 'Why didn't you give it to charity?' they mean 'Why didn't you give it to me?'

A lot of magicians seem to spend a lot of their time and energy trying to acquire money - which I've always thought is a bit dodgy. If you look at Crowley's autobiography, a lot of time is spent trying to get some rich widow to become his next scarlet woman who's going to give him a lot of money. Austin Osman Spare on the other hand, lived in poverty all his life. A better magician than Crowley in some respects ... a wonderful artist. Someone said to him, 'If you're such a great magician why aren't you rich?' And he replied, 'Do you really believe I would use what I can do to attract so much as a penny?' He was outraged by the notion.

Money is a magical phenomenon. Because there's nothing there. You didn't burn, for example, food. Most of the governments of the world destroy food every day so as not to bring down the market price. You didn't burn Art (the pictures on the notes are okay, but you wouldn't want them on your wall); you didn't burn Literature -both of these things are burnt every day; you didn't burn people. What you burnt was paper that is a symbol of value.

Money as I understand it ... let's take the American system ... if you want to issue new notes you have to have them guaranteed by the treasury - they will issue promissory notes that will guarantee the money. But the Government has to back up those promissory notes with Government bonds. Government bonds are backed up by cash - it's a complete circle; there's nothing real there

Increasingly, money is only an idea electrical signals passing around the world. Officially we're still on gold the bank will still promise to pay you the gold value of your £5 note. But rationally, if you take all the gold in the world it would make a cube about the size of a tennis court at Wimbledon. There is not that much gold. All that money is is an idea that everybody has bought into, and because of that it is real - it doesn't matter that there is nothing there. It's noth-ing physical but nevertheless it's a force that can level continents.

If you look at Stone Age societies say the Indians when white settlers turned up and said 'We want to buy Manhattan and we've got six strings of beads here the Indians thought they were conning the white men, because in their way of thinking, you couldn't own anything. It was a ridiculous idea that you could own a country. They thought it was like selling the Brooklyn Bridge: 'Give us the beads and you can own Manhattan.' They didn't realise that the other party in the bargain would find it a bit more binding! Before money the bartering and swapping was to some degree a lot fairer. You will always have forces that control money, who will inevitably end up with most of it. Once you have this imaginary force then you can start abusing it. And the abuses can be terrible.

So, if money is only a symbol then the only effective gesture that could possibly be made against money is a symbolic gesture. The only attack that can be made on money itself is to burn it. By burning it, essentially you're saying, 'I don't believe in this' which is a dangerous thing to say you're fucking with the magic. If people stop believing it ceases to exist. You're making a statement in what I'd call the collective idea space of the populace.

Money is code for the entire material world. Everything has its price. You can buy a lot of life. You can buy a lot of death. I can almost see this act as a prophetic event: the material world itself is pretty much like money in that it's an idea and our ideas are going to change drastically over the next 15 to 20 years.

I think we're moving towards some sort of paradigm shift, or massive collective mental breakdown some huge step of some kind; a basic change in our thinking. In politics, religions and the various structures we have built up, the world not the planet but the idea of the world we've created is likely, at least conceptually, to go up in flames the end of the world figuratively, but not apocalyptically not like a traditional notion of Armageddon. Maybe we've always imagined it's going to collapse I'm not trying to be millennial about this I don't see 'the destruction and end of the world', that chimera that we always seem to dangle over ourselves. Rather around this juncture of history when all of our systems are unstable and teetering towards this point of climax and collapse, we should consider the speed at which our culture is learning.

These ideas are perhaps best framed by the notions of Period Information Doubling. If you take a period in human information when the first hand axe was invented, for example as the arbitrary point when human information starts, and take it up to the end of the Roman Empire in those tens of thousands of years you have one period of human information. If you assess how much was discovered and invented during that period allowing you to perceive a subsequent point where you have the same amount again of discovery and invention, thereby doubling the amount of human information it is obvious that that process doesn't take tens of thousands of years it might only take one thousand.

Between 1960 and 1970, human information doubled. Recently, human information has been doubling every 18 months that means that in the last 18 months there has been more information and discovery than in the whole of previous human history. There will come a point in about 2020 where it goes off the graph: where human information is doubling every couple of weeks no one knows what will happen after that. It's unimaginable we are at an event horizon then you become a singularity (the speed of light being seen). This would seem to represent some kind of serious shift in the way we think. We've had those sort of shifts before just the move from agricultural to industrial, etc but this is, I think, of a different order, something bigger. The computers are inventing more computers. It's like everything we've ever dreamed of becomes possible in the first hundredth of a second and then all the shit we haven't dreamed of yet becomes possible in the next hundredth of a second. And then ...

That's what I mean by the end of the world not the planet or people, but the end of the idea system, which is, in truth, all the world really is. Dreams. The world is only our perception of the world.

In the Qabbalistic systems the physical world is called malkuth, and they have an exercise to explain to you what that is. For example, take a perfume something that means something to you. It could be a rose. You smell the perfume and you think of everything that you associate with that perfume: the smell of scented greeting cards; the War of the Roses every rose symbol that you can think of. That is not malkuth. Then you sniff it again and just focus on pure perception of scent. That is malkuth.

When our perception of the world changes as radically as I think it's going to, then it's the start of something else ... unimaginable. In the firelight there you have a symbol, money is a code for the entire material world. You can buy anything with money: information; all of our thoughts, deeds, life, death, birth, food, sex ... everything. Human time. Money is a code for human time, all our ideas are tied up in that symbol. In the firelight of your burning I could see a pre-cursor of a kind of symbolic Armageddon.

By filming it, you can now see it from a long way away; we're nearly a couple of years away from it already and can still see it. I like the idea of doing it in some very remote, intense personal space, but filming it so that firelight can be passed on to whoever chooses to watch it.

It's a powerful, magical event - in fact, I can't see any other explanation for it. You're dealing with a form of language, a conversation - but you're not sure what the conversation is, you're waiting for a reply.