Digital cultural platforms as emerging institutions: Garage Digital case study

This thesis examines whether digital cultural platforms can function as cultural institutions in their own right — a broader category than "museum" in the ICOM sense, which the thesis treats as one normative reference among several rather than a defining boundary — taking Garage Digital (the digital art platform launched in 2019 by the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow) as its central case study. Chapter 1 situates the concept of the "digital museum" historically, tracing its development from the artist-led net.art experiments of the 1990s through the institutionalisation of the museum website as a genre, the distinct trajectory of Russian digital practice, and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also shows that the term "digital museum" remains theoretically underdefined, unable on its own to settle whether a digital platform can count as an institution in its own right. Chapter 2 addresses this gap by building a working theoretical framework, combining classical institutional definitions (ICOM) and museum-communication theory (Hooper-Greenhill) with organisational institutionalism (Meyer and Rowan; DiMaggio and Powell) and platform and infrastructure studies (Plantin, Lagoze, Edwards, and Sandvig) to create a graduated set of criteria for assessing institutional status. Chapter 3 applies these criteria empirically to Garage Digital through its institutional history, interface, discourse, and accessibility, supplemented by a head curator interview Nikita Nechaev. Chapter 4 shows these findings comparatively on two contrasting cases: the Rijksmuseum, representing a digital initiative fully integrated into a physical museum, and CIFRA, an independent, commercially structured digital art platform. Chapter 5 synthesises these comparisons to assess the extent to which, and the conditions under which, Garage Digital has functioned as an independent institution. The thesis demonstrates that institutional status rests on five separable criteria — legitimacy, funding independence, permanence, governance and curatorial control, and public value, embeddedness, and accessibility — rather than a single threshold, and that Garage Digital occupies a hybrid position: institutionally legitimate and formally distinct in some respects, while remaining structurally embedded within its parent museum in others.