The way the term ‘Visual Studies’ is used in this essay differs from its usual synonymic usage with ‘Visual Culture’ as known from dozens of the readers with the latter title that have been published over the past two decades. Instead, the general expression ‘Studies’ should be understood as an umbrella-term for in other respects disciplinary rather complementary diverged research interests for the ‘Visual Culture’ on one hand and for the ‘Visual Communication’ on the other. The iconological-qualitative methods of the former and the statistic-quantitative methods of the latter demonstrate clearly the disadvantages of the respective usage of one disciplinary perspective. Taken together, both directions reflect the similar intolerance known between the ‘Cultural Media Studies’ and ‘Communication Media Studies’ while all together relate in a more or less aggressive manner to the Art History of the Modernist period.
Having Processual Arts in mind, it is fair to say that the spatiotemporal and audiovisual dimensions of framings require a widened attention and intensified theorizing to meet the recurring and emerging case studies. The next level of both concretization and abstraction can be achieved by the focusing on time frames. The latter arises out of the need for further methodological inquiry into the frames and framings from the perspectives of the contemporary art history and visual studies. Shifting the focus especially to the boundaries (or frames and framings) of the visual studies, it leads directly to the need for continuous developing of the appropriate approaches to the ‘image(s)’ and the research into their strategies and negotiations as well. The example of ‘video semiology’ (Takahiko Iimura) is used as an exemplification of one promising balance act.