Give us your icons, your graphics, your remixed media yearning to break free!

You know what’s awesome? The plans for the OTW’s Torrent of Our Own (TO3)!

What’s that? Good question! Part of the Archive of Our Own, the Torrent of Our Own is a private bittorrent tracker for distributing transformative audio-visual works like fan art, vids, fic trailers, AMVs, political remixes, podfic and other audio, machinima, and other digital fanworks.

What does that mean? It means the OTW is working on a way to share fan-made images, audio, and video that’s dedicated to fannish creative works (and thereby awesome). (Read more about the TO3 and our other multimedia-related projects.)

… No, wait! What we actually meant to say is awesome: CONTESTS! FANNISH CREATIVITY! TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS!

Merging the awesomeness, we’re having a contest to celebrate our hopes, dreams, and goals for the TO3: We want your graphics (or vids!) and we want them in by September 19th! Awesomeness squared means we’re asking for meta graphics about visual transformative culture. “Draw all the things!” “I Can Has Art Nao?” “Vidding Is Hard!”

OTW TO3 Graphics Challenge

Copy & paste to help us promote the challenge!

Just email premiums@transformativeworks.org with your work in whatever format you think we can reasonably expect to be able to open and show people, and in whatever size or file dimension you desire – wallpapers, icons, buttons, banners – anything goes! (Even a vid? Well, who are we to stop you?)

You’ll receive our undying gratitude and be entered to win our fancy OTW merch – we’ll be asking our community to vote for the top 3 entries between 22 and 29 September. Third place wins OTW stickers and buttons, second place wins OTW stickers, buttons and a water bottle and our first place winner will receive OTW stickers, buttons, a water bottle and custom buttons and/or iron-ons (winner’s choice) commemorating the win!

The fine print: Submissions will be displayed with attribution. Submitted work may become an official OTW graphic, shareable and modifiable with credit. Graphics that are transformative are fair game for the contest, so anything goes, but we can’t make submissions that include unauthorized images or that are specific to a single fandom into official OTW graphics. (Your original art, public domain images, or images licensed as Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 are fine, though!) We’re always thrilled to accept graphics celebrating the OTW and any of our projects, though only those focused on visual fanworks qualify as entries in this particular contest.

2010-08-11 admin
Spotlight, Vidding
  1. skywaterblue commented: I have a related problem which may not be solvable by OTW. I have this massive collection of West Wing promo photos and paparazzi snaps which I collected during the years the show was on: 1999 - 2006. Okay, well, I've tried releasing a bunch on LJ at times in photospams through my own private hosting but I'm worried about what happens if the ancient harddrive I'm storing these on goes kaput, or what happens if I can't pay my own hosting bill someday. Or just plain decide I'm tired of keeping them. It's a relative problem because now that the show's been off the air for several years, most of these pictures are not easy to find on the internet - if they're still there at all. The best solution would be some sort of archival place to post them. Any thoughts? This problem is relative to a lot of fandoms, I reason, especially to those who like to make icons and other graphic based fanwork.
    • Heather Cook commented: Open Doors may be able to assist in this instance. Let me talk to our Legal Committee, and I will get back to you with more information....