some of you might've seen this: https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/post-intellectual/how-many-among-you-know
i was hoping that someone would know by now and demonstrate that knowledge, but as usual i was releasing something obscure into a crowd that didn't have the time or the stupidity to care. it's supposed to be a fast fourier transform.
however, guess who can't figure out how to recover the image without reinstalling an old tool (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3137dDa6P4s). this will suck. a lot.
post-intellectual
an update on this. i found some clues through digging through the source code of older versions of g'mic (https://gmic.eu/files/source/). turns out the image is made from some split-up 24-bit float images. but the results of any inverse fourier transforms still seem a bit screwed. still not sure why.