Vertical Roll(1972)

Vertical Roll is a landmark experimental video artwork that interrogates the representation of women through performance and technology. Artist Joan Jonas inhabits multiple personas—cast as an "electronic erotic seductress"—to expose how female roles shift yet remain fundamentally unequal. The work's central formal device is a deliberate desynchronization of the monitor's frequencies, producing a relentless vertical distortion that fragments Jonas's body and image across the screen. This visual disruption becomes inseparable from the work's critique: the camera implicates viewers in the act of looking, while the rolling scan lines assault the very images they transmit. Characterized as a "disjunctive self-portrait," Vertical Roll uses technological malfunction as both medium and metaphor, transforming video glitch into a powerful statement about how women's identities are mediated, scrutinized, and ultimately fractured by the apparatus of representation itself.