Screengrab of facebooksuicidewatch.com

It’s a safe bet that callous humor will always find a home on the internet. Filed under such we find Facebooksuicidewatch.com, a project of 24 year old internet artist-programmer-provocateur Ryder Ripps. Ripps, also known for making web sites for M.I.A., created the popular image-based chat site dump.fm. His new project uses openfacebooksearch.com to cull Facebook status updates containing the words “kill myself”, cascading to the tune of “Uninvited” by Alanis Morissette in MIDI.

At first glance a viewer will notice the vast majority of included status updates are actually sarcastic, but periodically a bona fide suicidal profile pops up. Like usually stalking people on the internet, this is at once fascinating and a little creepy. Somewhat disturbingly, all the included profiles are linked to through the cascading updates.

While it seems possible that Ripps’ impetus to create facebooksuicidewatch.com was just to troll drama queens, the most compelling consequence of the project is its diffusion of public and the personal. Although we often use social networking services as a sounding board for oft-private concerns, the structures through which we do so–Facebook, Twitter, et cetera–are organized to mine data from its users, personal or not. Mirroring this and mining data in his own right, Ripps does well to remind us that on the internet, nothing is sacred.