dlloyd:
Yes, but they don't come in thru-hole dip packages, which the OP wants to work with (and I don't blame him either, knowing my own soldering skills).
22 of these should do to trick. Or, so would local converters to digital (however in this case there might be 3,000+ solder connections to make).
So there were two reasons why I didn't want to use the non-through-hole versions. Firstly, I'm not certain I could solder them, although I've seen using lots of flux makes it simpler (I've never tried). But in addition I was going to make a tiny circuit for each cell with the RGB LED, IR LED, IR sensor and so on. I can easily solder through-hole DIPs etc. to copper stripboard. But I don't even know what you solder the SOIC (what are they called?) components to (stripboard??) - perhaps somewhere sells breakout boards I could find with presoldered 32-channel MUXs.
So using the two tier MUXing solution you've described seem okay to me. The only thing I don't know is, how fast could I read all 288 sensors by switching these multiplex layers and then converting and storing all the analogue values as a 8-bit digital values? I want to keep a 12 by 24 array updated with the IR detected values. Preferably updated 30 times a second or thereabouts. The the RGB LEDs would respond in some way - play animations, change colour... that kind of thing!