Electrical impedance tomography is an imaging modality for extracting information on the interior structure of a physical body from boundary measurements of current and voltage. This work studies a new robust way of modeling the contact electrodes used for driving current patterns into the examined object and measuring the resulting voltages. The idea is to not define the electrodes as strict geometric objects on the measurement boundary, but only to assume approximate knowledge about their whereabouts and let a boundary admittivity function determine the actual locations of the current inputs. Such an approach enables reconstructing the boundary admittivity, i.e. the locations and strengths of the contacts, at the same time and with analogous methods as the interior admittivity. The functionality of the new model is verified by two-dimensional numerical experiments based on water tank data.