In recent years, the notion of the archive has risen from the architectural concept of the archive as a firm location (building, institution, original document) towards the archival as a soft infrastructure (digitization, low-res copy, data-bank). While the researcher of the 20th century often meant to travel to the original documents located at a particular place, the work in the 21st century often consists in processing digitized material that travels as data-files on hard-drives, via computer screens or as low-res print copies. Instead of defining the work with the archive only as leading towards excavation finds of the expert who masters ‘the law of what can be said’ (Michel Foucault), the proposal of an archival metabolism considers the archival as a transformative system that metabolizes data towards its own laws and languages as well as its own sociabilities, geographies and time-zones with the possibility to «initiate what is not yet there» (Harun Farocki). The talk will relate to two different practice-based archival frameworks: the Travelling Communiqué project-at-large as well as the first steps of archiving processes at the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin.