Pleasure Dome’s ambitious fall program promises many fresh sights and sounds for the city’s more adventurous and novelty-starved moviegoers. Over the next two months, the Toronto film and video exhibition group presents a huge range of work, including art-world miscreant Mike Kelley’s three-hour magnum opus Day Is Done and a retrospective on New German Cinema renegade Alexander Kluge. The season opens this weekend with a group show at Pixel Gallery that’s highlighted by the deliriously gory animations of Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg.

But the title of Pleasure Dome’s new program, “A Lower World: Excesses and Extremes in Film and Video,” provokes two questions. After decades’ worth of outré practices by everyone from the Vienna Aktionists to Matthew Barney, what excesses and extremes are there left for anyone to achieve? Furthermore, how can they possibly compete in an era in which the likes of “2 Girls, 1 Cup” — the rare example of an experimental, non-narrative short film that did not involve any arts-council funding — become internet sensations seen by millions?

Luckily, the work of Laurel Nakadate points to some answers, along with such follow-up questions as “what would possess a young woman to record herself performing dance routines to a Britney Spears song, serving as a topless model or faking her own death in the homes of strange single men she just met?” Such activities have earned the 32-year-old New York-based artist, filmmaker and photographer kudos from The New York Times, The Believer and Vice. She’s in town this weekend for three Pleasure Dome events, including “We Are All Made of Stars,” a program of 10 videos she’s made since 2000. She also just finished Stay The Same Never Change, a feature-length work that will have its official premiere next spring.

By acting as a fantasy object to her visibly awkward subjects (most of whom she met when they were trying to pick her up) or presenting herself as a Lolita in a variety of other contexts and guises (she’s particularly fond of her old Girl Scout uniform), Nakadate explores thorny matters of sex, subjectivity and social alienation. But perhaps what’s most startling about her work — especially early pieces like Oops (2000), which documents her unusual tribute to Britney Spears — is how it has anticipated the ways in which YouTube is demolishing traditional boundaries between not just private and public but artist and consumer.

“YouTube is, what, three or four years old?” Nakadate says over the phone from New York last week. “It’s not even kindergarten age yet and it’s changed our lives. I’m teaching this video class at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and I was talking to all these 18-year-old students about YouTube. They all thought I was crazy when I said that I consider YouTube folk art. To them, YouTube is not art — it’s just this dumb pop-culture thing you waste your time on. But I look at some of the user-generated stuff on YouTube and I think that it’s this amazing, strange folk art made by amazing, creative people in the middle of nowhere.”

Having grown up in small-town Iowa, Nakadate is familiar with the middle of nowhere. This may be why her work is so attuned to teenage fantasies of glamour, romance and escape, fantasies which she’s just as likely to enact alone as with her subjects. Consequently, the more overt displays of sexuality have a curiously innocent quality — in other words, it’s not the nudity that makes them provocative, despite what more salacious descriptions of Nakadate’s work may suggest. As she wryly notes, “Everyone has a sex tape these days so my art isn’t actually that controversial.”

She also emphasizes the fact that the cunning nymphets she plays in her videos are more fictional than autobiographical, saying that she is “kind of a normal, boring person in my real life.” What’s not normal is how willing she is to involve relative strangers in her work, thereby temporarily alleviating the feelings of loneliness that haunt everyone she presents on screen. She wonders whether the difference between her and most people — including the countless YouTube exhibitionists who have turned their bedrooms into impromptu soundstages — is that they “spend most of their lives trying not to interact with anyone” while her art compels her to do the opposite.

By way of example, Nakadate describes an incident that happened to her earlier that day: “I was walking down the street and there was this guy carrying this emaciated little calico cat. And it was wearing a T-shirt for a dog. If the cat had been a chihuahua, it still would have been ridiculous but somehow acceptable. But it was this emaciated calico. First of all, how often do you see someone carrying a cat in public, especially a grown man cuddling a sad sick cat in public? It was the strangest thing. I wanted to go talk to him, and I realized, ‘No, you’re not supposed to go talk to this person.’ But what stopped me from going to talk to him was not the taboo of talking to strangers. I was thinking that cat is sick and I don’t think I want what it has!”