This chapter analyses technologies of border control that operate through recognition. The technologies are used in various border settings, but are united by a shared technotemporal quality, namely that they identify persons and objects by comparing them to already registered IDs and already known threats. The chapter will first describe the principles and visual skills involved in running the Automated Border Control system in Copenhagen Airport, comparing them with face-to-face ('manual') border control and random checks on intra-Schengen flights. Secondly, the use of an X-ray scanner to determine the contents and possible threats of passenger luggage in Gibraltar Airport will be analysed. In all these cases, humans and machines deploy refined and often interlaced visual and sensory skills or methods to determine whether a person or an object may pass or requires further scrutiny. This work engages with a complex combination of data, recognition and memory, and sensing and sensory skills that come to be mutually formative. The machinic operations are largely based on and formed according to human capacities and at the same time format how and what the humans operating the technologies come to sense and see, as well as 'unsee', in an interplay of continued enskillment and deskillment. We could tentatively characterize this integrated human-technological border assemblage as cyborgian (Haraway, Wolfe, and Haraway 2017; Wells 2014) in that human and technological processes and sensory connections supplement and reinforce one another. But, as we shall see, they sometimes also destabilize one another's operations and skills and work in more contested and disconnected ways, thus undermining the analytical pertinence of the connected symbiotic cyborg. The chapter further analyses the kinds of suspicious relations-notably between faces and identities-that arise and undergo scrutiny in border control and the thresholds of resemblance that are required to pass border control: that is, how much one needs to resemble one's ID photo. Finally, the chapter presents a particular element of airport Chapter 3
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