Augmented Dordrecht(after Tollens)

a publication from 'a future museum of the present'

Augmented Dordrecht concerns itself with an act of tracing. It takes as its starting point an examination of the photographic archival memory of Dordrecht’s cityscape as preserved and presented through a range of printed publications. Key amongst these are the photographs of HJ Tollens (1864 – 1936) as recorded in the publication ‘Het Dordrecht van Tollens ’ (Boekhandel De Bengel, 2000).

This encounter with the traces of early photography and its re-presentation in the present through the mobile medium of the mass printed book provides the base line for another set of interventions. In this case digital imaging technologies are employed in order to speculatively imagine a reactivation of the historical archive within the real space of contemporary Dordrecht through the use of contemporary ‘locative media ’. In a sense, this book acts as a proposal for a larger work, which reactivates the historical archive, placing the viewer back into the physical space once occupied by the photographic tripod of Tollens, allowing us to view the ‘archival trace’ alongside the contemporary through ubiquitous prism of a proposed ‘Smartphone App’.