<p>The multi-media research collective, The Preserving Machine, was initiated through collaborative discussion in response to Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story of the same name. However, his positionality is problematic as it both highlights the nature of preservation as being potentially extractive and does not account for the agency of the machine in the process. The text foregrounds the ways in which current computational forms of photogrammetry are conceived in the humanities, with reference to the language of post-cinema, gaming and, most importantly, photography. The argument is structured to mirror the digital production pipeline of photogrammetric processes to highlight the problematic industry rhetoric claiming objectivity, accuracy and automation. This methodology thus deals with issues surrounding the choice and capture of data input, consideration of the black-boxed processing and mutative automation and expectations surrounding reproducibility.</p>