The 4th World Clock is an animated clock that ticks a non-standard tick — instead of the standard intervals of time (seconds/minutes/hour), it ticks based on the rate of housing foreclosures in the city of Detroit in the last decade.

The clock is generated by a javascript expression that calibrates the clock to tick according to housing foreclosures by taking ‘the hour on the clock' and replacing it with ‘rate of house on the street foreclosed in the last decade.'

The Fourth World clock therefore ticks more than twice as fast as a standard clock (57.142857% faster).

As the clock ticks, a scene in front of an empty lot on Church Street in Detroit warps over time. This is the street that my mother grew up on. The house was sold in the late 1990s when my grandmother passed away. It was foreclosed in the early 2000s — just one example of 139,699 others. The Church Street house was abandoned, decayed, demolished, and is now an empty lot.

The image of the empty lot warps as an animation via pixel displacement, a non-interval based visualization of time. The clock ticks as the background decays until leaving a stagnant digital living room against chromagreen.