Terms and policies (“Parameters”) for ZO’s creative expos are general and meant as a guideline for those entering. All submissions are subject to these Parameters and should be read and reviewed before entering, as everyone entering is subject to them. If you disagree with the Parameters of the expo, please do not enter.
ZO is a community of artists with a growing vision. We invite you to fully explore the creative offerings presented by our different kind of Universe. You will gather as you read through our content, that we are not a typical business, as usual, type — hence, most of our outreaches and creative expos have a certain unique tilt. ZO is an experiment in human artistic connection with the high concept of building respect between people, cultures, and creative disciplines while working to promote peace through the arts
For the first 10 years of ZO’s existence, we offered a “Free First Entry” for the multiple levels that our Expos offer to all those submitting. The free first entries are paid for by Artitude, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization. Our current Expo has 4 component Levels. Starting this year, we have initiated fees for Levels 2 and Theta (4) of the Expo. (Levels 1 and 3 remain free for the first entry). If we are to survive, we need to operate on a new level and simply have to find new ways to fund our continuing operations. Fees help with costs for the expos and support our mission to broaden positive artistic communications between diverse people around the world.
Parameters are subject to change and will be announced on this page. All submissions are subject to these parameters and any changes made.
Expo Parameters . . .
ZO’s creative Expos are designed as expository contributions to our expanding community of artists and authors. As such, the goals are not only to find the creative piece judged best — but also to reveal the wealth of work that we receive. We have worked hard to provide clear guidelines regarding the Expos and we continually evolve and improve, clarify, and enhance our communications to accurately evaluate and fairly present content.
Creative Submission, Evaluation, and Selection.
Most of our Expos run for three to four months, but 2020 began a very unusual worldwide drama. The worldwide pandemic that we all dealt with and continuing global issues have changed access, especially for young artists in high school and college, who are usually a large part of our constituency. Our Expos are open to anyone over the age of 13 from anywhere in the world. Of course this is subject to your own unique regional, country, direct, or local authorities.
We are generally extending the time durations for our Expos to offer more time for consideration. It is certainly our feeling that creativity, art, thoughts, and life in general, could stand to be a bit slowed down and more fully enjoyed. During the term of the Expo, content is assessed and rated by a diverse group of evaluators who compile a blind top tier of finalists to be forwarded to Expo Judges. The Judges then rate the blinded submissions with numerical ratings. Those numerical ratings are then averaged, and winners are chosen based on these mathematical calculations.
Per our developing tradition, we may formulate a schedule from other top-tiered entries for feature and publication and post that schedule. Awards must be claimed within 30 days of notification. If our email (with notification of the award) is not responded to within thirty (30) days, the award will be donated to charity. All awards are in U.S. dollars.
We consider our awards a kind of honorarium for great work. We do not ask for exclusivity to publish the works, nor do we need anything other than a photo for art entries. For video entries, we ask that those be published on YouTube and we judge from the already published work. Art, Poetry, Literature, including fiction writing must be your own. We have decided that we will not at this time judge AI art in comparison to human generated art. While we are astounded by and truly think modern technology has opened a whole new world of creativity, ZO is primary concerned with fostering and developing human generated creativity, so the works we are seeking must be from the creator’s own hand and ability to create. We include digital creations in the art we accept but all AI generated materials must be marked as such and will be judged in a separate category.
Again, we do not need exclusive rights to publish submitted work and creators of submitted works retain rights to their original work. Submitted literature cannot be AI generated (submissions must be submitter’s original writings only). We keep an archive of winners and continue to highlight work sent in (of course with proper credit), so we do ask that you send us non-exclusive work with the understanding that we may publish the work in perpetuity.
Our awards are intended as a token of our appreciation and celebration of your work. For some entering, the awards may cover no more than a nice dinner with friends, for others it may buy books, (dependent on where you are in the world — help with rent), etc. ZO is connected to a broad array of international creatives and we are mainly hoping to inspire and provide an enjoyable place for sharing. In order to offer awards (honorariums), we need a minimum participation of 100 entries per category.
We have found a lot of the entries we receive to be quirky, avant-garde, often excellently precise and other times deliberately abstract — and there are simply only “subjective” rulings for such when weighed together. The very talented global community that we now reach, and decisions on winners, have been very close and are subject to the broad tastes of our diverse community. That said, we have determined that all of our viewers and the large constituency of artists that we deal with are all eligible to enter any of the Expos. We debated whether we should allow past winners to enter and have, for the moment, decided that “yes” past winners may enter all Expos. We believe our diverse constituency of evaluators, along with the blind judging does yield a fair, mathematically derived winner — so if you win 4+ years in a row — congratulations.
