Ad Inexplorata (Approaching the Unknown)
Mark Elijah Rosenberg is a film director, writer, editor and producer, and is the Founder and former Artistic Director of Rooftop Films.
Artist BioAd Inexplorata (Approaching the Unknown) is a multimedia fictional story of an astronaut heading to Mars alone on a one-way mission. The piece exists in multiple forms: first as endurance-based performance art, then as live-action theater and finally as a film with an accompanying website. The project includes audience interaction at all stages. Almost entirely set within the grumbling hull of a spaceship traveling 60 million miles from Earth, Ad Inexplorata also includes the astronaut’s journals, scientific research, mission explication and Rosenberg’s own discourse of the narrative symbolism. Ad Inexplorata is an introspective story about one man and his mission seeking the wonders of the universe.
From the Journal
On June 3, Mark Elijah Rosenberg’s Creative Capital project, Approaching the Unknown, will be released theatrically in ten cities (see list at bottom of post), and available on-demand. The story follows Captain William D. Stanaforth (played by Mark Strong), an astronaut on a one-way solo mission: taking humanity’s first steps toward colonizing Mars. Although the entire world is watching him, he is completely alone in a dark and distant sea of stars. Stanaforth rockets bravely through space facing insurmountable odds, but as the journey takes a toll on his life-sustaining systems, he is forced to make impossible choices that threaten his sanity, mission and very existence. Approaching the Unknown received the Creative Capital award in 2012.
Mark Elijah Rosenberg
Brooklyn, NY
Mark Elijah Rosenberg is a filmmaker and the Founder and former Artistic Director of Rooftop Films. Born and raised in New York City, Rosenberg received his BA from Vassar College and began showing movies on his roof in 1997. Rosenberg has published articles on filmmaking and programming, lectured at schools and conferences, programmed film screenings across the world, and served on juries for festivals and grant panels. Rosenberg has shot, directed and edited dozens of films and commercials, and was a director on the WNYE television show IMNY. Mark recently co-created and directed a segment of Orbit(Film), an omnibus movie about our solar system. He directed and produced the six-hour mini-series Year Million for National Geographic. His feature film debut, Approaching the Unknown, was in theaters nationally in 2016. He is currently developing a fiction feature about a man who discovers a small but magnificent super power.