ABSTRACT
The work in the labs and the kinds of technologies developed there are not only an outcome of biometric researcher’s research agendas or of the political and economic structures and cries for security. The development of these technologies is also an outcome of the ‘wild’ and uncontrollable phenomena, the people, environments and practices that exist outside the laboratory that require the laboratory researchers’ attention. The technologies produced through multiple engagements described also have to be implemented in what figures as ‘the wild’ when seen from the labs, for instance, at land, sea and air borders, in ATMs, in cars and mobile phones. ‘The wild’ remains an important general trope for the world outside the controlled environment, as well as a way of addressing the unforeseeable circumstances and occurrences that may have implications for the working of the biometric technologies once they are ‘let loose’.
