The role of the US government in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66 has been researched for decades. However, a large collection of US government documents from the Jakarta US Embassy was recently declassified, providing clearer insights into the extent of US awareness and involvement. This Protocols of Killings PARSE theme is an evolving platform for an eponymous artistic research project exploring these recently declassified archives through various ongoing collaborations.

The platform’s core material is the once-classified cables that passed through the US Embassy in Jakarta, spanning the years 1964-1968. These 35,642-page archives were declassified in 2018 through an initiative of the National Security Archives, a non-profit research institution at the George Washington University. The archives—which this platform’s editor came to call the Protocols of Killings archives—provide a comprehensive record of communications during the critical period surrounding the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. The artistic research documented in this platform—titled Protocols of Killings: 1965, distance, and the ethics of future warfare—aims to analyze patterns of group dynamics within the 35,642-page archives, and reimagines them as the patterns of communication between swarm drones, a future technology of warfare currently being developed and discussed as unprecedented distant killings.