ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part focuses on the everyday sociotechnical practices, tinkering and experimentation that makes laboratory work engaging to the biometric researchers and that enables the use of body fragments for purposes of biometric identification and recognition. It argues that researchers, rather like explorers and cartographers, explores new body landscapes, experimenting not least with alternative approaches to map them. Biometric laboratories affiliated to universities can be found across Europe, often as part of larger departments or research centres focusing on, for example, machine vision and signal analysis, computer science and information security. Biometric technologies are not simply produced in research labs, and the work with the ‘biological body’ in biometric science is only possible after an arduous process of separation of the body from its multiple socio-material entanglements.
